'Hang the dog,' said the leading counsel for the prosecution, in a case where a disappointed lover had slain his rival. Thrilled with the tragic effect of the whole scene then being enacted, I thought it would be grand sometime to say the same thing in the same way. From the sphere of influence of those words I could not escape; by that picturesque display of oratory I was uprooted from the soil, and taken forever out of the class of producers. To a country lad of sixteen murder sounded like something criminal, which really ought to be punished. I wished that I were a barrister, so that I too might take part in putting people to death. I wondered how it was that I had not before recognized the impulse and power that I now instinctively felt. Certain was I that every vile reptile of the species Homo sapiens who transgressed the command, "Thou shalt not kill,' should be hanged; and that of all men I was the person best fitted by nature to enforce that divine law.

A farmer friend advised that if I wished to become a lawyer I ought to go to Chicago, and try cases for the corporations. He did not know that my secret purpose in life was to hang someone, and that my plan was to settle wherever my services were most needed. I selected Peoria. 'But up there,' he said (meaning Chicago), 'they pay ten thousand dollars a year.' That seemed like a vast fortune, hardly to be accumulated in one life

time. From that day forward Chicago was a doomed city—I could feel it. I knew that sooner or later she must open her gates and surrender. But I did not know then that the demand for competent lawyers is always greater than the supply, simply because excellence in every line of human endeavor is very limited. Anyway, I had decided to give Peoria the first chance to be saved from legal chaos.

But in about eight weeks after starting I had a very decided feeling that I should have stayed on the farm where I belonged. I could see that my ambition to hang either man or beast was waning. And it looked to me as if Peoria did not care to be saved.

A deficit in my accounts soon ceased to worry me. It was very nearly my normal state. I never saw such peaceful, law-abiding citizens. No one seemed to appreciate the fact that a veritable Moses was in their midst, and that I was there for the purpose of ridding the community of bad characters. Embryonic greatness appeared to be a drug on the market. I would have sold myself 'short.' Finally a friend from my home town established himself in Peoria, in the buggy business. He felt sorry for me, and said so. I believe he was afraid he would have to support me. My first case in a court of record was his suit in replevin to recover ten thousand dollars' worth of buggies. The amount dazed me. I hardly knew whether to file a declaration or a

complaint. I had a case now, and was certain that I needed a lawyer. Common honesty required that I advise my friend to employ a regular attorney.

On the way to the trial I met a lawyer who is now a Federal Judge, and expressed to him my fear of the lawyer on the other side. 'Young man,' said he, 'you are the best lawyer in the country. Never admit that there are any better.' In order to make out a case I had to show fraud, and could not quite make the grade; but this case is where I learned that, as my judicial friend said, self-reliance, confidence in your own ability, is fundamentally essential to a lawyer's kind of salesmanship. The man who appears in court uncertain of his position, doubtful of the law, and ready to admit (if charged with it) that he is a fool anyway, should be operating with a broom of bristles and a shovel. The young man who is willing to turn the right cheek if smitten on the left may as well enter the prize ring as the law. 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' said the old prosecutor at Fairfield, 'is the unalterable will of God.'

A very demure and modest brunette came to my office and complained that her husband had abandoned her and wrongfully taken away her piano. I brought suit to recover it. All through the trial, defendant's counsel kept in the foreground the fact that my relations with my client had been very friendly; that we had been seen together on a steamboat excursion and at a dinner party. The purpose was manifest. It was embarrassing, too. It looked as though I had broken up a home, and ought to be horsewhipped. Something had to happen to change that atmosphere. Fortunately, counsel overplayed his hand by too much cross-examination. He asked her if I had not, at a dance before her husband left her, told her that she was 'very

beautiful.' I knew she would truthfully answer, 'No'; but I objected on the ground that it did not affect her title to the piano, and said, 'I will leave it to the jury to say now whether I was right or wrong.' The jurors laughed; and I added, ‘Her husband won't speak to her. Why should he object if others do?' That changed the atmosphere always a very decisive thing - and left unimpeached her personal beauty, which of itself clearly constituted a preponderance of the evidence. The presumption that a beautiful woman is truthful cannot be overcome by proof; and the reader can well imagine who got the piano.

The campaign of 1900 was approaching, and if the Democratic candidate should be elected State's Attorney I wished to become his Assistant. This was my opportunity to become 'the secular arm' of the State, as it was described by the scholiasts of the Spanish Inquisition. I was in Peoria for that 'sacred' purpose, and to ‘abandon' all accused ones to that secular arm. The chief of police had officially refused to permit a lawyer friend of mine, a duly licensed attorney, to interview his client then in the city prison, on the ground that he was not lawyer enough to be recognized. My friend did not look upon that as much of a compliment, and did not consider it a final adjudication. He felt sure there was a technical flaw somewhere in that holding. It became necessary to institute a proceeding against the 'Chief' to recover the statutory penalty for such a violation of the rights of attorney and client. The leaders of the three big Democratic wards of the city insisted that I withdraw from the case, and said that if I appeared against the 'Chief' my chances of becoming Assistant to any Democratic State's Attorney were ruined. I appeared against him, and the ruling of the chief of police

was reversed; and my friend thereafter enjoyed the rare distinction of having it established by adjudication that he was a regular lawyer. He was grateful to me. I know he was. He gave me the advantage of considering my efforts as a personal favor to him, and never commercialized our friendly relations by offering me any part of the proceeds. People appeared to have the idea that I was practising law for the exercise. The net result to me, however, was very satisfactory. After I became a prosecutor I learned that all contest for my job ended with that trial; and that the defeat in that case of the incoming State's Attorney commanded his respect.

The People of the State of Illinois vs. William Dooley was called for trial on the morning of the day we went into office. The charge was murder. I was nearing the goal of my early ambition

but not yet. While playing a game of billiards the defendant had struck someone on the head with a billiard cue and killed him; and who should appear as counsel for the defense but the far-famed and able previous State's Attorney. He was of commanding appearance physically, and of great intellectual power. In his opening he made an exhaustive and convincing outline of the evidence; then he turned toward me with a snarl, as though I had insulted him, and, apparently resenting my arrogance and conceit in being there at all, said, 'I'll show this young laddie-buck how to try a lawsuit.'

I do not know why that should affect my knees, but it did. My thought was 'I guess you will, all right.' I had a vague feeling that I might be in trouble myself before the thing was over. I thought I ought to apologize for insulting the jury with my presence. Dooley did not appear to be the dog I intended to hang. But the best thing counsel showed me was the great advantage of

keeping your own temper when your opponent loses his. In that case I learned the real power of being cheerful when your opponent is angry. Counsel's bitterness toward me personally cost his client twenty years in the penitentiary.

'Ellsworth Hinckle Kills Wife; Cuts Jugular Vein' appeared the following July in large black letters across the front page of the morning papers. I moved slowly. I walked silently to the office, instinctively reflecting upon my early ambition. I knew the hour had come. There was nothing I wished to say; yet almost aloud I thought, 'Here is the case at last.' The State's Attorney looked me over intently, and after a pause said, 'Well, say it.' After some hesitation I got it out: 'They will hang this man.' They say Webster spent thirty years preparing for his reply to Hayne. For twelve years I had looked forward to this case. The evidence disclosed that the defendant had theretofore beaten his wife and driven her out into the street to prostitute herself for his support. That was enough to hang any man. It was no victory for the State.

But when I got squarely up to the point of saying, 'Hang the dog,' they appeared to be 'lost words.' All my life I had worked toward this moment. I had struggled for years to get into a position where, officially, I could use those words. I had rolled them over in the roof of my mouth so many times I could almost sing them. And now I could not get them out. I could find no place in my argument to put them. They did not seem becoming or appropriate. I was so sure that the jury would hang the defendant that I did not feel like adding insult to injury. It did not seem right for the State, in that bestial manner, to demand the sacrifice of blood. In my heart I looked upon capital punishment as a relic of

barbarism, like witchcraft and human slavery. By that time I had come to believe that Jesus or anyone else had the right to change a law which justified polygamy, slavery, the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, and blood for blood.

At 10 P. M. the jury came in, slowly and solemnly. It was the death penalty.

At last I had taken part in one of those bloody orgies of breaking the neck of a human being and strangling him to death that are called capital punishment. Illinois had receded from the teachings of the Lowly Nazarene, and had glutted the savage vengeance which it inherited from the cave man and from the desert tribes of two thousand years before the Christian era. Most of the other revealed laws have been abandoned, presumably as of spurious origin; but this particular one, 'Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed,' we cling to, as of the very essence of divinity. It is the last one of the great State crimes inaugurated by those who did not know that the sun and moon cannot stand still, and who believed that Balaam's ass conversed with its master. Capital punishment in its inception is a form of religious neurosis, which in most cases prevents the proper punishment of capital crime and in no case prevents the crime. Certainty of imprisonment is more deterring than a ninety-per-cent chance of escape. When and wherever capital punishment has been abolished crime has been relatively less. Whoever would murder expecting life imprisonment is not deterred by any penalty. The 'hang the dog' philosophy of the modern mind, the 'hang the dog' arguments of prosecutors, contribute as much as any other one thing to the failure of juries to convict. Some day in the approaching scientific age that human mass called

the people will realize that capital punishment is no more justified than any of the other prodigious crimes authorized by those who did not know that blood circulated in their veins or that there is such a thing as a law of gravitation.

II

To proceed with my journey: I had longed for the Hinckle case; and, while I prosecuted other capital cases, from that day forward I abhorred them. Homicide is justifiable only in individual self-defense against an assailant; but, in order that society may defend itself against the further assaults of any individual, is it necessary to take his life? Is it foreign to the criminal law to consider the natural rights of the parties? A prosecutor with an ambition to hang someone is unfit to represent the State. And the prosecutor who goes so far away from the question of the guilt of the defendant and the character of the crime in the abstract as to indulge in personal abuse of the defendant or his counsel is going away from the goal of his ambition to become a trial lawyer. Prosecutors constantly induce acquittals by engaging in personal animosities with more experienced counsel for the defense, who deliberately initiate controversies with a motive very similar to that of a mother bird in fluttering about at some distance from the nest. The Hinckle case was the line of cleavage between what is commonly expected as to the duties of a prosecutor and the correct conception of what they are.

I was beginning to learn, too, that advocacy is an art; that the argument is but a small part of the forensics of a lawsuit; that there is eloquence in the massing, sequence, and clear presentation of the evidence, and value in the unimportant incidents of a trial.

The decisive influence of immaterial