"And they told you?" queried the judge, leaning forward to poke the coal fire into flame.
"They said that nothing could be done now for these California Clarks, because it would make a lot of trouble and harm innocent people to go back of the new titles to the property," Adelle replied.
"And they were perfectly right," Judge Orcutt said, with a long sigh, after a moment of consideration. "It was the only thing they could say to you!"
He went into the law of it and explained to Adelle, more clearly than it had ever been done, just how the uncertain title had finally been "quieted," all the legal steps which had been duly taken to notify the unknown heirs, and the judicial sale ordered by the court, with the meaning of the process.
"So you can see that the law took great pains to find these people, and make sure that no wrong should be done to any rightful claimants, and because it failed to find the lost heirs there is no reason why people who bought the land in good faith should be made to suffer. You see?"
Adelle saw, but she was disappointed. It was the same thing the trust company had said to her, only now she felt sure of it. What could she say to her young cousin? That troubled her a great deal. She hated to disappoint his expectations, which she had ignorantly aroused.
"And the law is right," the old judge mused aloud, "whatever hardship it may seem to work to these unknown heirs like your California cousins. For you must see that human life could not go on unless we cleaned the slate sometimes arbitrarily, and began all over. It is better for everybody to accept certain inexact or unjust conditions rather than to disturb the whole fabric of human society by attempting to do exact justice, which, after all, is in itself a human impossibility. That is what our good people, reformers and anarchists alike, often fail to understand!... So these Clarks, I am afraid, will have to suffer for the carelessness of their ancestor in not leaving his address behind him when he left for the West. No court would open up the old tangle about Clark's Field now that it has been finally adjudicated according to due process of law. No court would order the case reopened—it is res judicata, fixed unalterably!"
He smiled indulgently upon Adelle with his little tag of legal Latin. He might be a poet, but he knew the laws of inheritance, and moreover, now in his old age, he had come out from his valleys of indecision and knew that there must be many wrongs both legal and extra-legal in our human system, and that it was not always accomplishing the most good to try to do exact justice. As he had said to Adelle, ours is a world of chance and mistake, and the most wholesome thing for every generation is to wipe the slate clean as far as possible and go ahead hopefully, courageously to create a new and sounder life upon a substructure possibly of fraud and injustice and cruelty. Thus man climbed always upwards. To rend and tear and fight, to try to eradicate every wrong was also human, but it was largely futile.
So when Adelle ventured to say,—
"But people often do try to upset titles, don't they? I have seen stories in the newspapers about heirs getting together to recover possession of valuable lands that have been out of the family longer than Clark's Field."