The organization of these courts is simple. There are not many rules or technicalities. The judges are patient, hard working, understanding, and efficient. The trouble is with the laws they are called upon to administer: Laws which are as absurd, as farcical, and as impracticable as the plot of the lightest musical comedy.
At first the visitor can hardly understand what is going on. A pale-faced man is in the witness chair, on his left a bedraggled little woman is standing before and below the judge, her eyes just level with the top of the desk. Clerks are coming with papers to be signed: "commitments," "adjournments," "bail bonds"; others are trying to engage his attention. In the meanwhile the case proceeds.
"I inform you," says the judge to the woman, "of your legal rights, you may retain counsel if you desire to do so and your case will be adjourned so that you may advise with him and secure witnesses, or you may now proceed to trial. Which will you do?"
She murmurs something. She is pale-faced with sullen eyes, drooping mouth, an over-hanging lip. A sad red feather droops in her hat.
"Proceed," says the judge; and to the policeman who is called as a witness, "You swear to tell the truth, the whole truth mm-mm-mm—you are a plain-clothes man attached to the 16th Precinct detailed by the central office, what about this woman?"
"At the corner of Fifteenth Street and Irving Place," says the witness, "between the hours of 10:05 and 10:15 this evening I watched this woman stop and speak to three different men. I know her, she has been here before your Honor."
"What do you say?" the judge asks the woman. She is silent.
"What do you work at?"
"Housework, your Honor."
"Always housework; it is surprising how many houseworkers come before me." She smiles a sickly smile.