That peculiar form of human activity, or inactivity, known as getting a
law practice, has been so abundantly treated on the printed page that
I have not the temerity to add to the literature on the interesting
subject. The experience is never dramatic, even if it is sometimes
tragic, and it is so often tragic that there has seemed no other
recourse for mankind than, by one of those tacit understandings on
which our race gets through life, to view it as a comedy. It is no
comedy, of course, to the chief actor, who is sustained only by his
dreams, his illusions, and his ideals, and he may count himself
successful perhaps, if, when he has lost his illusions, he can retain
at least some of his ideals, though the law is too apt to strip him
of both. However that may be, in my own experience in that sort there
was an incident which made its peculiar impressions; indeed, there
were several such incidents, but the one which I have in mind involves
the perhaps commonplace story of Maria R----, which ran like a serial
during those trying years.
I had intended to take up the practice of law in Chicago; I was quite
certain that there I should set up my little enterprise, and this
self-same certainty is perhaps the reason why I found myself back in
Toledo, in a lonely little office in one of the new office buildings;
sky-scrapers they were called in the new sense of metropolitan life
that then began to pervade the town; they were not so very high, but
they seemed high enough to scrape the low skies which arch so many
of the grey days in the lake region. It was as long ago, I believe,
as the time of Pythagoras that the law of the certain uncertainty of
certainty was deduced for the humbling of human pride, and when my
certainties with regard to Chicago proved all to be broken reeds,
there were more gray days in that region of the intemperate zone than
the meteorological records show. The little law office had a portrait
of William Dean Howells on its walls, and in time the portraits of
other writers, differing from those other law offices which prefer to
be adorned with pictures of Chief Justice Marshall--a strong man, of
course, who wrote some strong fiction, too, in his day--and of Hamilton
and of Jefferson, indicating either a catholicity or a confusion of
principle on the part of the occupying proprietor, of which usually he
is not himself aware. There were a few law-books, too, and on the desk
a little digest of the law of evidence as affected by the decisions
of the Ohio courts. I had the noble intention of mastering it, but
I did not read in it very much, since for a long while there was no
one to pay me for doing so, and I spent most of my hours at my desk
over a manuscript of “The 13th District,” a novel of politics I was
then writing, looking up now and then and gazing out of the window at
the blank rear walls of certain brick buildings which made a dreary
prospect, even if one of them did bear, as I well remember, the bright
and reassuring legend, “Money to Loan at 6 per cent.”
There were not many interruptions at first, but after a while, when I
had been appointed as attorney to a humane society, there were times
when I had to lay my manuscripts aside. I felt it to be, in a way, my
duty to long for such interruptions, but they usually came just at
those times when I was most absorbed in my manuscript, so that their
welcome, while affectedly polite, was not wholly from the heart. One
of these intrusions resulted in a long trial before a justice of the
peace; it was a case that grew out of a neighborhood quarrel, and all
the inhabitants of the _locus in quo_ were subpœnaed as witnesses.
Such a case of course always affords an opportunity to study human
nature; but this one, too, had the effect ultimately of bringing in
many clients--and, as Altgeld had said, by way of advice to me, got
people in the habit of coming to my office. Those witnesses acquired
that habit, and since human nature seemed to run pretty high in that
neighborhood most of the time, they got into a good deal of trouble;
they were most of them so poor that they seldom got into anything else,
unless it were the jail or the workhouse, and some of them were always
ready to help send others of them to those places. Out of the long file
of poor miserable creatures there emerged one day that Maria R---- of
whom I spoke. She was a buxom young German emigrant, not long over from
Pomerania, and her fair skin and yellow hair, and a certain manner she
had, marked her out from all the rest. She came with her children one
morning to complain of her husband’s neglect of them; and to her, as to
the whole body of society which thinks no more deeply than she did,
it seemed the necessary, proper, and even indispensable thing to put
Rheinhold--that was her husband’s name--in jail (You should have heard
her speak the name Rheinhold, with that delicious note in which she
_grasséyéd_ her r’s.) There she sat, on the little chair by the window,
with her stupidly staring boy and girl at her knees, but in her arms
the brightest, prettiest, flaxen-haired baby in the world, a little elf
who was always smiling, and picking at her mother’s nose or cheeks with
her fat little fingers, and when she smiled, her mother smiled, too; it
was the only time she ever did.
Rheinhold of course drank; he “mistreated” his children--that is, he
did not buy them food. And since the Humane Society was organized and
maintained for the explicit purpose of forcing people to be humane,
even though it had to be inhumane to accomplish its purpose, the duty
of its attorney was clear.
Its attorney just then felt in himself a rising indignation, moral of
course, yet very much like a vulgar anger. To look at those children,
especially at that baby of which Maria was so fond, much fonder it
was plain to be seen than of the other two, and to think of a man
not providing for them, was to have a rage against him, the rage
which society, so remorselessly moral in the mass, bears against all
offenders--the rage a good prosecutor must keep alive and flaming in
his breast if he would nerve himself to his task and earn his fees and
society’s gratitude. And whom does society reward so lavishly as her
prosecutors?
However, that is not the strain I would adopt just now. I felt that
very rage in myself at that moment, and straightway went and had
Rheinhold arrested and haled before a judge in the Municipal Court,
charged with the crime of neglecting his children. I can remember
his wild and bewildered look as he was arraigned that morning. The
information was read to him, and he moved his head in such instant
acquiescence that the judge, looking down from his bench, asked him if
he wished to plead guilty, and he said “Yes.” It seemed then that the
case was to be quite easily disposed of, and the prosecutor might feel
gratified by this instant success of his work; and yet Rheinhold stood
there so confused, so frightened, with the court-room loungers looking
on, that I said:
“He doesn’t understand a word of all you are saying.”
And so the judge entered a plea of “not guilty.”
I knew a young lawyer with rather large leisure, and I asked him to
defend Rheinhold. He was glad to do so, and we empaneled a jury and
went at what Professor Wigmore calls the “high-class sport.” We became
desperately interested of course, and for days wrangled according to
the rules of the game over the liberty of the bewildered little German
who scarcely knew what it was all about. Now and then he made some
wild, inarticulate protest, but was of course promptly silenced by his
own lawyer, or by the judge, or by the rules of evidence, which could
be invoked--with a deep sense of satisfaction when the court ruled
your way--to prevent him from telling something he had on his mind,
something that to him seemed entirely exculpatory, something that would
make the whole clouded situation clear if it could only find its way to
the light and to the knowledge of mankind.
There was a witness against him, a tall, slender young German
shoemaker, and it was against him that Rheinhold’s outcries were
directed. It was not clear just what he was trying to say, and there
was small disposition to help him make it clear. His lawyer indeed
seemed embarrassed, as though in making his incoherent interruptions
Rheinhold were committing a _contretemps_; he must wait for his turn to
testify, that all might be done in order and according to the ancient
rules and precedents, and, in a word, as it should be done. Under the
rules of evidence, of course, Rheinhold could not be allowed to express
his opinion of the shoemaker; that was not permissible. The court could
not be concerned with the passions of the human heart; this man before
the court had a family, and he had neglected to provide food for it,
and for such a condition it was written and printed in a book that
the appropriate remedy was a certain number of days or months in the
workhouse.
And so while Rheinhold silently and philosophically acquiesced, we
tried him during one whole day, we argued nearly all the next day to
the jury, and the jury stayed out all that night and in the morning
returned a verdict of guilty. And Rheinhold was sent to the workhouse
for nine months.