Meet the “glad-hand,” ubiquitous charlatan: Janus-faced, side-stepping straddler; monkey-on-a-stick to the last touch; echo of the last voice; hand behind his back for “cash”—no paper, no witnesses, since he is clever as the foraging fox is clever; plausible peddler of light promises with which to ease the going to his goal; insinuating distributer of tainted largesse; any man’s man so he be the highest bidder; no man’s man who despises disloyal duplicity; mixer with mixers of noxious social broth, this man-mongrel of varied type and intensity of crass cunning, is the most craven of moral cowards, in that he cannot be brought to an accounting with conscience. Were he “hitched to a star,” he’d just naturally fix his gaze on the abyss. Everywhere he interposes the oblique act to queer the big thing. In reform endeavor, he plays to hands that land him within the big money, and let intrinsic reformative processes go hang.
The so-called “good mixer” will measure to any length of tape. At his best, he will stretch to the size of a Warren G. Harding, motivated by impulse to reduce friction engendered by clashing convictions. He seldom does less than well, because he is guided by a genuine desire to help ease the heart of contention, through striking a working balance and thus leaving the contenders with hands clasped. Such serve God in serving man.
At his worst, he will shrink to the stature of the political man-of-all-work. His part it is to veer votes to suit his paymasters. What his instruments to hand? Ask him, since the print of a paragraph can encompass but a modicum of his machinations.
From ward heeler to worshipful woman, this subterranean trickster is charged with selection of the tool that will turn the trick.
The “instrument” may take the form of a crass bid in coin of the realm for such as marshalling of thugs to intimidate units of the opposition at the polls, and to line up “floaters”; or to dig up detached matter written or spoken by an opponent, and so garnish and garble it as to rob it of the meaning the original spokesman, or writer, intended it should convey; or to shout from the house tops the minute details of a natural fault, buried for long years under the statute of limitations, and through the offender having taken on nobility of soul after having squared the account, in so far as it could be squared; or to persist in a campaign of slander concerning allegations that had time and again been discredited through due processes of unquestionable research; or to stir up antagonisms of class and creed that persist beyond the polls, and further close the eyes of single-seeing partisans and bigots. In short, to deal dirt-daubed deuces from the bottom of the political deck, e’en though by so doing he outrages decency, and reverses the Great Pleader, Who cautioned so often for charity in human judgments.
Who does not know the legal trimmer whose best hold is debasement of the trademark of his craft? The basic bones of jurisprudence, and the ethics of his profession, alike make it morally incumbent upon a lawyer to see justice done—no more, no less. True, the human mind in all of its functioning is fallible. There will be honest differences of interpretation as to what constitutes justice, agreeably with legal lore, written and traditional; but there can be no defense of the shyster whose practice reduces mainly to attempts at derailing justice; of him who elects to effect inequitable exchange, or to defeat the aims of law framed to assure the common peace and security.
Because legions of spurious practitioners the country over lend themselves to grease the going for recidivistic criminals, it is largely that the latter take long and desperate chances they would not dare otherwise. The reason given also explains in positive part why the American marauder is flippantly the most deadly of any of his ilk in the world; and why he constantly mounts in numbers beyond those of any other nation.
To the barterers of the bebadged: to those intrusted with the public safety on the first lines of social defense, it is left to lengthen the long odds yielded the criminal in his pursuit of crime. Shameful, and hard to tell as it is of a body of men, the grand majority of whom remain faithful to their oaths of office, it is nevertheless true that a constantly increasing percentage of active peace officers of cities of the first class particularly, wink at penal offenses not only, but actually lock arms with felonious offenders in the landing of all kinds of unlawful loot. Moreover, it is by no means exceptional for policemen to hold criminous club over the heads of certain of ex-prisoners who, given a fair fighting chance, probably would have “pulled straight” after parole from prison. And moreover, it has been charged freely, betimes established in courts of law, that morally-debauched chieftains had impelled police pawns to urge criminals to greater activity in the garnering of tainted spoils, in the division of which, king-pin grafters declared themselves “in” for the lion’s share.
And then, as if to bind the whole nefarious business, self-nominated lay reformers with itch for place and portion, or for specific power and control, or for a cheap popularity with prisoners, or to be cited as bellwethers of reform, or from just ornery ignorance, couldn’t rest satisfied until they had deleted from reformative measures next to the last of directive virtue; and from the commission of crime, drawn all but the sterile sting of consequence. This, in the first instance, through so ordering educative processes as to strip them of fundamental efficience, while at the same time capitalizing by-play charged both with the spirit and practices of the would-be parasitic sport; and in the second instance, by granting paroles based mainly on behavior, instead of on an acquired ability in the manual and auxiliary processes, sufficient to meet free-life exactions at honest endeavor.
More than any other class of social wreckers, the latter individuals have been blamable for the rough-riding killer; firstly, because they have been men, by and large, who should have been so pestled in the social crucible as to have made it practically impossible for them to have veered so grossly from essential human values, while confounding magnitudes; and secondly, for the reason that they have wrecked in the teeth of the most solemn opposition of those who have made a life’s concentrated study of that which makes and keeps men criminal: done it while breaking bread with criminals, and done it with due regard for every known finite and infinite influence that makes for the social rehabilitation of the repeating felon.