nable machinery of precedent, rulings, decisions, objections,
writs of error, motions for new trials, appeals, reversals, affirmations
and the rest of it, is a transparent and iniquitous systems of
"cinching." What remedy would I propose? None. There is none to propose.
The lawyers have "got us" and they mean to keep us. But if thoughtless
children of the frontier sometimes rise to tar and feather the legal
pelt may God's grace go with them and amen. I do not believe there is a
lawyer in Heaven, but by a bath of tar and a coating of hen's-down they
can be made to resemble angels more nearly than by any other process.

The matchless villainy of making men suffer for crimes of which they may
eventually be acquitted is consistent with our entire system of laws--a
system so complicated and contradictory that a judge simply does as he
pleases, subject only to the custom of giving for his action reasons
that at his option may or may not be derived from the statute. He may
sternly affirm that he sits there to interpret the law as he finds it,
not to make it accord with his personal notions of right and justice. Or
he may declare that it could never have been the Legislature's intention
to do wrong, and so, shielded by the useful phrase _contra bonos mores_,
pronounce that illegal which he chooses to consider inexpedient. Or
he may be guided by either of any two inconsistent precedents, as best
suits his purpose. Or he may throw aside both statute and precedent,
disregard good morals, and justify the judgment that he wishes to
deliver by what other lawyers have written in books, and still others,
without anybody's authority, have chosen to accept as a part of the law.
I have in mind judges whom I have observed to do all these things in a
single term of court, and could mention one who has done them all in a
single decision, and that not a very long one. The amazing feature
of the matter is that all these methods are lawful--made so, not by
legislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used with
sufficient lucidity and positiveness to land them.

The legal purpose of a preliminary examination is not the discovery of
a criminal; it is the ascertaining of the probable guilt or innocence
of the person already charged. To permit that person's counsel to insult
and madden the various assisting witnesses in the hope of making them
seem to incriminate themselves instead of him by statements that may
afterward be used to