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.
The hammer snapped sharply on the cartridge; a great wave of horror and
revulsion swept over me in a rush of blood to my head, and I dropped
the revolver on the floor and threw myself on my bed.
By some miracle the cartridge had not exploded; but the nervous shock
of that instant when I felt the trigger yield and the muzzle rap
against my forehead with the impact of the hammer--that shock was
almost as great as a very bullet in the brain. I realized my folly, my
weakness; and I went back to my life with something of a man's
determination to crush the circumstances that had almost crushed me.
Why do I tell that? Because there are so many people in the world who
believe that poverty is not sensitive, that the ill-fed, overworked boy
of the slums is as callous as he seems dull. Because so many people
believe that the weak and desperate boy can never be anything but a
weak and vicious man. Because I came out of that morbid period of
adolescence with a sympathy for children that helped to make possible
one of the first courts established in America for the protection as
well as the correction of children. Because I was never afterward as
afraid of anything as of my own weakness, my own cowardice--so that
when the agents of the Beast in the courts and in politics threatened
me with all the abominations of their rage if I did not commit moral
suicide for _them_, my fear of yielding to them was so great that I
attacked them more desperately than ever.
It was about this time, too, that I first saw the teeth and the claws
of our metaphorical man-eater. That was during the conflict between
Governor Waite and the Fire and Police Board of Denver. He had the
appointment and removal of the members of this Board, under the law,
and when they refused to close the public gambling houses and otherwise
enforce the laws against vice in Denver, he read them out of office.
They refused to go, and defied him, with the police at their backs. He
threatened to call out the militia and drive them from the City Hall.
The whole town was in an uproar.
One night, in the previous summer, I had followed the excited crowds to
Coliseum Hall to hear the Governor speak, and I had seen him rise like
some old Hebrew prophet, with his long white beard and patriarchal head
of hair, and denounce iniquity and political injustice and the
oppressions of the predatory rich. He appealed to the Bible in a calm
prediction that, if the reign of lawlessness did not cease, in time to
come "blood would flow in the land even unto the horses' bridles."
(And he earned for himself, thereby, the nickname of "Bloody Bridles"
Waite.)
Now it began to appear that his prediction was about to come true; for
he called out the militia, and the Board armed the police. My brother
was a militiaman, and I kept pace with him as his regiment marched from
the Armouries to attack the City Hall. There were riflemen on the
towers and in the windows of that building; and on the roofs of the
houses for blocks around were sharpshooters and armed gamblers and the
defiant agents of the powers who were behind the Police Board in their
fight. Gatling guns were rushed through the streets; cannon were
trained on the City Hall; the long lines of militia were drawn up
before the building; and amid the excited tumult of the mob and the
eleventh-hour conferences of the Committee of Public Safety, and the
hurry of mounted officers and the marching of troops, we all waited
with our hearts in our mouths for the report of the first shot.
Suddenly, in the silence that expected the storm, we heard the sound of
bugles from the direction of the railroad station, and at the head of
another army--a body of Federal soldiers ordered from Fort Logan by
President Cleveland, at the frantic call of the Committee of Public
Safety--a mounted officer rode between the lines of militia and police,
and in the name of the President commanded peace.
The militia withdrew. The crowds dispersed. The police and their
partisans put up their guns, and the Beast, still defiant, went back
sullenly to cover. Not until the Supreme Court had decided that
Governor Waite had the right and the power to unseat the Board--not
till then was the City Hall surrendered; and even so, at the next
election (the Beast turning polecat), "Bloody Bridles" Waite was
defeated after a campaign of lies, ridicule, and abuse, and the men
whom he had opposed were returned to office.
I had eyes, but I did not see. I thought the whole quarrel was a
personal matter between the Police Board and Governor Waite, who seemed
determined merely to show them that he was master; and if my young
brother had been shot down by a policeman that night, I suppose I
should have joined in the curses upon poor old "Bloody Bridles."
However, my prospects in the office had begun to improve. I had had my
salary raised, and I had ceased doing janitor work. I had become more
of a clerk and less of an office boy. A number of us "kids" had got up
a moot court, rented a room to meet in, and finally obtained the use of
another room in the old Denver University building, where, in the
gaslight, we used to hold "quiz classes" and defend imaginary cases.
(That, by the way, was the beginning of the Denver University Law
School.) I read my Blackstone, Kent, Parsons--working night and
day--and I began really to get some sort of "grasp of the law." Long
before I had passed my examinations and been called to the bar, Mr.
Thompson would give me demurrers to argue in court; and, having been
told that I had only a pretty poor sort of legal mind, I worked twice
as hard to make up for my deficiencies. I argued my first case, a
damage suit, when I was nineteen. And at last there happened one of
those lucky turns common in jury cases, and it set me on my feet.
A man had been held by the law on several counts of obtaining goods
under false pretences. He had been tried on the first count by an
assistant district attorney, and the jury had acquitted him. He had
been tried on the second count by another assistant, who was one of our
great criminal lawyers, and the jury had disagreed. There was a debate
as to whether it was worth while to try him for a third time, and I
proposed that I should take the case, since I had been working on it
and thought there was still a chance of convicting him. They let me
have my way, and though the evidence in the third charge was the same
as before--except as to the person defrauded--the jury, by good luck,
found against him. It was the turning point in my struggle. It gave
me confidence in myself; and it taught me never to give up.
And now I began to come upon "the Cat" again.
I knew a lad named Smith, whom I considered a victim of malpractice at
the hands of a Denver surgeon whose brother was at the head of one of
the great smelter companies of Colorado. The boy had suffered a
fracture of the thigh-bone, and the surgeon--because of a hasty and
ill-considered diagnosis, I believed--had treated him for a bruised
hip. The surgeon, when I told him that the boy was entitled to
damages, called me a blackmailer--and that was enough. I forced the
case to trial.
I had resigned my clerkship and gone into partnership with a fine young
fellow whom I shall call Charles Gardener[2]--though that was not his
name--and this was to be our first case. We were opposed by Charles J.
Hughes, Jr., the ablest corporation lawyer in the state; and I was
puzzled to find the officers of the gas company and a crowd of
prominent business men in court when the case was argued on a motion to
dismiss it. The judge refused the motion, and for so doing--as he
afterward told me himself--he was "cut" in his Club by the men whose
presence in the court had puzzled me. After a three weeks' trial, in
which we worked night and day for the plaintiff--with X-ray photographs
and medical testimony and fractured bones boiled out over night in the
medical school where I prepared them--the jury stood eleven to one in
our favour, and the case had to be begun all over again. The second
time, after another trial of three weeks, the jury "hung" again, but we
did not give up. It had been all fun for us--and for the town. The
word had gone about the streets: "Go up and see those two kids fighting
the corporation heavyweights. It's more fun than a circus." And we
were confident that we could win; we knew that we were right.
One evening after dinner, when we were sitting in the dingy little back
room on Champa Street that served us as an office, A. M.
Stevenson--"Big Steve"--politician and attorney for the Denver City
Tramway Company, came shouldering in to see us--a heavy-jowled,
heavy-waisted, red-faced bulk of good-humour--looking as if he had just
walked out of a political cartoon. "Hello, boys," he said jovially.
"How's she going? Making a record for yourselves up in court, eh?
Making a record for yourselves. Well!"
He sat down and threw a foot up on the desk and smiled at us, with his
inevitable cigarette in his mouth--his ridiculously inadequate
cigarette. (When he puffed it, he looked like a fat boy blowing
bubbles.) "Wearing yourselves out, eh? Working night and day? Ain't
you getting about tired of it?"
"We got eleven to one each time," I said. "We'll win yet."
"Uh-huh. You will, eh?" He laughed amusedly. "One man stood out
against you each time, wasn't there?"
There was.
"Well," he said, "there always will be. You ain't going to get a
verdict in this case. You can't. Now I'm a friend of you boys, ain't
I? Well, my advice to you is you'd better settle that case. Get
something for your work. Don't be a pair of fools. Settle it."
"Why can't we get a verdict?" we asked.
He winked a fat eye. "Jury'll hang. Every time. I'm here to tell you
so. Better settle it." [3]
We refused to. What was the use of courts if we could not get justice
for this crippled boy? What was the use of practising law if we could
not get a verdict on evidence that would convince a blind man? Settle
it? Never!
So they went to our client and persuaded the boy to give up.
"Big Steve," attorney for the tramway company! The gas company's
officers in court! The business men insulting the judge in his Club!
The defendant's brother at the head of one of the smelter companies! I
began to "connect up" "the Cat."
Gardener and I held a council of war. If it was possible for these men
to "hang" juries whenever they chose, there was need of a law to make
something less than a unanimous decision by a jury sufficient to give a
verdict in civil cases. Colorado needed a "three-fourths jury law."
Gardener was a popular young man, a good "mixer," a member of several
fraternal orders, a hail-fellow-well-met, and as interested as I was in
politics. He had been in the insurance business before he took up law,
and he had friends everywhere. Why should he not go into politics?--as
he had often spoken of doing.
In the intervals of the Smith suit, we had had a case in which a
mother, whose child had been killed by a street car, had been unable to
recover damages from the tramway company, because the company claimed,
under the law, that her child was worthless alive or dead; and there
was need of a statute permitting such as she to recover damages for
distress and anguish of mind. We had had another case in which a young
factory worker had been injured by the bursting of an emery wheel; and
the law held that the boy was guilty of "contributory negligence"
because he had continued to work at the wheel after he had found a flaw
in it--although he had had no choice except to work at it or leave the
factory and find employment elsewhere. There was need of a law giving
workmen better protection in such circumstances. Why should not
Gardener enter the Legislature and introduce these bills?--which I was
eager to draft. Why not, indeed! The state needed them; the people
wanted them; the courts were crippled and justice was balked because of
the lack of them. Here was an opportunity for worthy ambition to serve
the community and help his fellow-man.
That night, with all the high hopes and generous ideals and merciful
ignorance of youth, we decided--without knowing what we were about--to
go into the jungle and attack the Beast!