IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE.
Valentine Willard was not a bad fellow at heart, although Gordon will never admit it. But Gordon is a crank who carries his professional enmity into private life.
Their trouble began about an “affidavit of merits.”
Gordon had a case in which he was about to enter judgment, when Willard blocked him off with an extension obtained from the Court by means of an affidavit, in which he swore that “his client had fully and fairly stated the matter to him, and from that statement he verily believed the defendant had a good and substantial defence to the action upon the merits.”
This, of course, was utter fiction. There was no thought of a defence. But delay defeats, and later Willard withdrew, allowing Gordon to take the twenty-fifth instead of the first judgment against his man.
The same thing is done every day of practice in the City of New York. Lawyers who are Officers of the Court prostitute the Court with cheerful zeal—men with a high sense of self-respect in their private lives, demean themselves beyond expression in their professional careers—gentlemen who would not stoop to the slightest equivocation up-town, perjure themselves for money down-town, or teach their clerks to do it for them. It is not a pretty practice, but Gordon ought to have known the custom. However, being young at that time, it still shocked him. To-day he says it only fills him with disgust. But he was just as much of a crank then as he is now, so he took Willard’s affidavit before the Grievance Committee of the Bar Association.
He might have seen the smile on the faces of his auditors as he told his story, had he not been blinded by zeal. However the Chairman was grave and judicial enough when he announced it was not the province of the Committee to take up the quarrels of counsel, and that they did not propose to investigate light accusations of perjury.
Indeed, the Chairman was so very judicial, and his speech so well delivered, that he might have been suspected of having said something of the same sort before under similar circumstances. But Gordon, crank that he was, thought of nothing but his point, and stoutly maintained that false swearing was being practised every day by lawyers, great and small—that tricks and treachery were personal matters reflecting on but not involving the profession as a whole, while licensed perjury was a travesty of law, striking at the very foundations of Justice. So he went on, boiling over with intensity and utterly innocent of tact.
But when the Chairman stopped him and said something about “seeking aid in legislative action,” or “going before a Grand Jury,” Gordon, young as he was, looked straight into the speaker’s eyes and drank in experience, if not wisdom, from their glance.