The judges aided in many States to make the courts over which they presided inefficient and to bring them into public contempt by their blind adherence to outworn precedent and their indiscriminating affection for technical pleadings. Though generally men of the highest personal probity, they might be relied upon in any trial to ignore the spirit of the law and the interests of society if a clever attorney could point out in the letter of the law or in some century-old precedent anything to justify them in so doing. A misplaced comma was sufficient to overthrow the intent of an entire statute.
This characteristic of the courts found ample room and verge enough for the most fantastic tricks in a society which was governed by annual legislatures, pouring forth with each succeeding session a very flood and freshet of ill-considered and crudely expressed legislation. So complicated and unintelligible at last became the law that those judges and counsellors who really loved Justice and persistently sought after her, were seldom able to discover her form or features through the mist and fog of statutes and codes and revisions and amendments and precedents which filled the atmosphere in every court devoted to law and, ostensibly, to justice. The wisest men and those who devoted their life-long study to the subject were not always able to tell what the law really meant, or whether it meant anything, under the varying interpretations put upon it by different expounders.
Thus it came to pass that any suitor or defendant, provided he was rich enough to secure adroit and learned counsel, was generally able so to delay and hamper the naturally loitering steps of the courts as, by the very law of chance, to bring about opportunities for escape which time could not help affording him. The rich man, whether in a civil or a criminal trial, was much more likely to win his case, whatever its merits, than the man who was unable to employ counsel familiar with the quips and crookednesses of the law. In truth, the prisoner accused of crime who was unable to pay large counsel fees or to bring “influence” to bear in some way or other upon the prosecuting officials, was apt to be treated with comparative severity. Within the same year a bank cashier of New York stole $800,000 from his bank, but escaped all punishment by negotiating with the directors for the return of $400,000; while a young street thief of the same city was sent to the penitentiary for twelve years for stealing a penknife worth twenty-five cents! The needy mechanic who purloined a few dollars worth of old junk and sold it to buy either bread for his family or liquor for himself was fairly sure to be punished with as long a term of imprisonment as the defaulter who made away with millions. He was, moreover, certain of punishment, if detected; while the greater thief had at least three chances in four of escaping untouched.
In all directions public sentiment had become corrupted; the popular aspiration had declined to low and sordid levels: yet men looked calmly on the sham and humbug and selfishness and dishonesty and injustice which made up the social order of the time, and felt neither fear nor disgust. Even those whose moral senses were acute enough to perceive the rottenness around them stopped their moral olfactories and blinded their moral vision with the unworthy reflection that the existing fabric would last out their time; and then the deluge might sweep whither it would.
III.
THE SOCIALISTIC POISON.
Meanwhile, below the thin and treacherous surface, the volcanic fires of a socialistic agitation were blazing up with daily increasing fierceness. The failure of work to laboring men; the widespread and intense suffering consequent thereupon; the conviction that this was not due to any lack of zeal or industry on their part, but to the unequal workings of an artificial and false social order; the growing belief that poverty had become a bar to civil rights, even in the courts, and that wealth had become a sufficient protector of injustice and crime,—all these things combined to add an irresistible weight in the minds of thousands of the less discriminating among the laboring class, especially those of foreign birth, to the arguments and appeals of the socialistic leaders in behalf of a complete overturn,—a “revolution.”
Some of these socialistic apostles were simply theorists who could not comprehend why their lofty ideals were in any way impracticable. Others were fanatics,—honest, zealous, earnest, and illogical as fanatics have always been. Others were really maniacs, whom a long life spent under the oppression and tyranny of foreign monarchies had driven into a fierce and virulent hatred of all government and all order. Others were men who would have been unwilling to earn their daily bread by honest industry, had the means been placed at their hands, but who foresaw in great popular disturbances possibilities for self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. All worked harmoniously, however, in the common direction of social anarchy. They had utterly unlike conceptions of the new order which ought to be established on the ruins of the old, but they were united in the one conviction that the old must be wholly demolished before the task of reconstruction could be properly begun. And so idealists of noble but impracticable aspirations, and brawling fanatics, and beery mountebanks, and maniacs ambitious for unbridled and orderless anarchy, though perhaps not on speaking terms with each other personally, worked together for one common end, and that end revolution and destruction.
The vigorous measures which had been taken by all the nations of Europe between 1885 and 1887 to clear their own borders of these revolutionists had been effectual in driving hundreds of thousands of them to America. They brought with them their theories, their fanaticism, their fierce hatred of all orderly society. Belonging for the most part themselves to the working-class, they mingled freely with the discontented and suffering workmen whom they found already too numerous in the land for the work which was offered either to labor or to skill. Everywhere they spread the infection of their destructive theories. Socialistic organizations sprang up, under one name or another, in almost every city and town and village. Beginning with the Hocking Valley riots in 1884–1885, and, like those disturbances, in constantly closer alliance with the trades-unions, these socialistic societies caused numerous local outbreaks in the districts where workmen were most numerous and work hardest to obtain. Pittsburg, Wheeling, and Fall River suffered especial loss in these riots.