It was the office of Mr. R. D. Thompson, who still practises in Denver; and his example as an incorruptibly honest lawyer has been one of the best and strongest influences of my life.
I had that one ambition—to be a lawyer. Associated with it I seem to have had an unusual curiosity about politics. And where I got either the ambition or the curiosity, I have no idea. My father's mother was a Greenleaf,[1] and related to the author of "Greenleaf on Evidence," but my father himself had nothing of the legal mind. As a boy, living in Mississippi, he had joined the Confederate army when he was preparing for the University of Virginia, had attained the rank of captain, had become General Forrest's private secretary, and had written—or largely helped to write—General Forrest's autobiography. He was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive genius, with a really remarkable command of English, and an absorbing love of books. My mother's father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, her mother was a Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a Methodist. The members of the family were practical, strong-willed, able men and women, but with no bent, that I know of, toward either law or politics.
And yet, one of the most vivid memories of my childhood in Jackson is of attending a political rally with my grandfather and hearing a Civil War veteran declaim against Republicans who "waved the bloody shirt"—a memory so strong that for years afterward I never saw a Republican without expecting to see the gory shirt on his back, and wondering vaguely why he was not in jail. When I came to Denver, where the Republicans were dominant, I felt myself in the land of the enemy. And when I "swapped" myself into Mr. Thompson's office, I was surprised to find that my employer, though a Republican from Pittsburg, was so human that one of the first things he did was to give me a suit of clothes. If there is anything more ridiculously dangerous than to blind a child's mind with such prejudices, I do not know what it is.
However, my own observations of what was going on about me were already opening my eyes. I had read, in the newspapers, of how the Denver Republicans won the elections by fraud—by ballot-box stuffing and what not—and I had followed one "Soapy" Smith on the streets, from precinct to precinct, with his gang of election thieves, and had seen them vote not once but five times openly. I had seen a young man, whom I knew, knocked down and arrested for "raising a disturbance" when he objected to "Soapy" Smith's proceeding; and the policeman who arrested him did it with a smile and a wink.
When I came to Mr. Thompson to ask him how he, a Republican, could countenance such things, he assured me that much of what I had been reading and hearing of election frauds was a lie—the mere "whine" of the defeated party—and I saw that he believed what he said. I knew that he was an honest, upright man; and I was puzzled. What puzzled me still more was this: although the ministers in the churches and "prominent citizens" in all walks of life denounced the "election crooks" with the most laudable fervor, the election returns showed that the best people in the churches joined the worst people in the dives to vote the same ticket, and vote it "straight." And I was most of all puzzled to find that when the elections were over, the opposition newspaper ceased its scolding, the voice of ministerial denunciation died away, and the crimes of the election thieves were condoned and forgotten.
I was puzzled. I saw the jungle of vice and party prejudice, but I did not yet see "the Cat." I saw its ears and its eyes there in the underbrush, but I did not know what they were. I thought they were connected with the Republican party.
And then I came upon some more of the brute's anatomy. Members of the Legislature in Denver were accused of fraud in the purchase of state supplies, and—some months later—members of the city government were accused of committing similar frauds with the aid of civic officials and prominent business men. It was proved in court, for example, that bills for $3 had been raised to $300, that $200 had been paid for a bundle of hay worth $2, and $50 for a yard of cheesecloth worth five cents; barrels of ink had been bought for each legislator, though a pint would have sufficed; and an official of the Police Department was found guilty of conniving with a gambler named "Jim" Marshall to rob an express train. I watched the cases in court. I applauded at the meetings of leading citizens who denounced the grafters and passed resolutions in support of the candidates of the opposition party. I waited to see the criminals punished. And they were not punished. Their crimes were not denied. They were publicly denounced by the courts and by the investigating committees, but somehow, for reasons not clear, they all went scot-free, on appeals. Some mysterious power protected them, and I, in the boyish ardor of my ignorance, concluded that they were protected by the Republican "bloody shirt"—and I rushed into that (to me) great confederation of righteousness and all-decent government, the Democratic party.
It would be laughable to me now, if it were not so "sort of sad."
Meanwhile, I was busy about the office, copying letters, running errands, carrying books to and from the court rooms, reading law in the intervals, and at night scrubbing the floors. I was pale, thin, big-headed, with the body of an underfed child, and an ambition that kept me up half the night with Von Holst's "Constitutional Law," Walker's "American Law," or a sheepskin volume of Lawson's "Leading Cases in Equity." I was so mad to save every penny I could earn that instead of buying myself food for luncheon, I ate molasses and gingerbread that all but turned my stomach; and I was so eager to learn my law that I did not take my sleep when I could get it. The result was that I was stupid at my tasks, moody, melancholy, and so sensitive that my employer's natural dissatisfaction with my work put me into agonies of shame and despair of myself. I became, as the boys say, "dopy." I remember that one night, after I had scrubbed the floors of our offices, I took off the old trousers in which I had been working, hung them in a closet, and started home; and it was not until the cold wind struck my bare knees that I realized I was on the street in my shirt. Often, when I was given a brief to work up for Mr. Thompson, I would slave over it until the small hours of the morning and then, to his disgust—and my unspeakable mortification—find that my work was valueless, that I had not seized the fundamental points of the case, or that I had built all my arguments on some misapprehension of the law.
Worse than that, I was unhappy at home. Poverty was fraying us all out. If it was not exactly brutalizing us, it was warping us, breaking our healths, and ruining our dispositions. My good mother—married out of a beautiful Southern home where she had lived a life that (as I remembered it) was all horseback rides and Negro servants—had started out bravely in this debasing existence in a shanty, but it was wearing her out. She was passing through a critical period of her life, and she had no care, no comforts. I have often since been ashamed of myself that I did not sympathize with her and understand her, but I was too young to understand, and too miserable myself to sympathize. It seemed to me that my life was not worth living—that every one had lost faith in me—that I should never succeed in the law or anything else—that I had no brains—that I should never do anything but scrub floors and run messages. And after a day that had been more than usually discouraging in the office and an evening of exasperated misery at home, I got a revolver and some cartridges, locked myself in my room, confronted myself desperately in the mirror, put the muzzle of the loaded pistol to my temple, and pulled the trigger.