e some few
pickings and perquisites which are well worth having."

Somebody in the audience cried, "Shame! Shame!" and a few more hissed;
but Jimmy quelled the rising storm by holding up his hand for silence.

"Listen and have patience, My Friends!" he appealed, oracularly. "Other
candidates from time immemorial have come to you with a lot of talk, but
I am the first one who has ever dared to be honest with you. Isn't that
true?"

Some of his party adherents, doing their best to uphold him to the last,
loudly assented, and yelled, "Give the Judge a chance to finish! Let him
finish!"

In tense silence and expectancy they settled back in their seats.

"Politics are to me like the law," he said, thoughtfully. "All bunkum! A
man comes to a lawyer to get a tiny agreement drawn that if he had the
brains of a cow he could draw just as well himself. The lawyer looks
profoundly intellectual, terribly wise, considerably puzzled as if this
document might require a further course in a law school to be able to
handle, and so forth, but I tell you, My Friends, that down in his
innermost mind all he is thinking is, 'How much can I get out of this
gazabo for this simple little job?' and then he taps the poor victim for
all he thinks the latter will stand, pockets the fee, and after his
client has gone, hands a memorandum to a four-dollar-a-week clerk and
says, 'Jones, fill up a contract form with that stuff and mail it to
this John Doe person in Squashville.'"

The crowd by this time was hopelessly divided, some believing the orator
facetious, and the others for the first time in their lives having
sympathy with a lawyer and believing they had for the first time met one
who told the truth.

"Most judges, My Friends, are elected to the bench because their fellow
lawyers think they will prove easy marks after they get there, and not
because they are supposed to be particularly clever in the law. The best
judge is the one that whacks his decisions up so that Lawyer Skinem
wins this week, and Lawyer Squeezehard the next, and Lawyer Gouge the
next, and so on. If he can satisfy the lawyers he becomes renowned, and
as far as the litigants are concerned, they don't matter at all. If they
had any sense they wouldn't resort to the law anyway. Any fool knows
that!"

Wetherby got up behind him, red faced and angry, to protest, but the
crowd howled him down. And Wetherby, muttering, stormed indignantly out
of the court room. Jimmy observe