It was nearly a year later that I paid my second visit to the police
court, on a day, like the first, humid and dull, but very close and
suffocatingly hot. It was a Monday morning, and there was a full
dock, as I have learned that the prisoner’s pen at the right of the
clerk’s desk is called. The clerk was standing with that sheaf of
indictments in his hand, and saying, “John O’Brien!” and John O’Brien
was answering, “Here, sor!” and the clerk was proceeding, “Complained
of for being drunk guilty or not guilty pay a fine of one dollar and
costs stand committed to the House of Industry,” and then writing on
the indictment, and tossing it aside. As I modestly took my stand
at the door, till I should gather courage to cross the room to one
of the vacant seats which I saw among the policemen, one of these
officers of the court approached me and said, “No room for you here
to-day, my friend. Go up on the Common.” In spite of my share of that
purely American vanity which delights in official recognition, I could
not be flattered at this, and it was with relief that I found he was
addressing a fellow-habitué behind me. The court-room was in fact very
full, and there were no seats on the benches ordinarily allotted to
spectators; so I at once crossed to my place, and sat down among the
policemen, to whom I authorized my intrusion by taking my notebook from
my pocket. I have some hopes that the spectators thought me a detective
in plain clothes, and revered me accordingly. There was such a person
near me, with his club sticking out of his back-pocket, whom I am sure
_I_ revered.
I had not come to report the events of this session of the court, but
to refresh the impressions of my first visit, and I was glad to find
them so just. There was, of course, some little change; but the same
magistrate was there, serene, patient, mercifully inclined of visage;
the colored attorney was there, in charge, as before, of a disastrous
Irish case. The officials who tried to keep order had put off their
flannel coats for coats of seersucker, and each carried a Japanese fan;
neither wore a collar, now, and I fancied them both a little more in
flesh. I think they were even less successful than formerly in quelling
disturbances, though they were even more polished in the terms of
their appeal. “Too much conversation in the court!” they called out to
us collectively. “Conversation _must_ cease,” they added. Then one,
walking up to a benchful of voluble witnesses, would say, “Must cease
that conversation,” and to my fellow-policemen, “Less conversation,
gentlemen;” then again to the room at large, “Stop all conversation in
the court,” and “All conversation must cease entirely.”
The Irish case, which presently came on, was a question of assault and
battery between Mrs. O’Hara and Mrs. MacMannis; it had finally to be
dismissed, after much testimony to the guilt and peaceable character
of both parties. A dozen or more witnesses, were called, principally
young girls, who had come in their best, and with whom one could fancy
this an occasion of present satisfying excitement and future celebrity.
The witnesses were generally more interesting than the parties to the
suits, I thought, and I could not get tired of my fellow-spectators,
I suppose, if I went a great many times. I liked to consider the
hungry gravity of their countenances, as they listened to the facts
elicited, and to speculate as to the ultimate effect upon their moral
natures--or their immoral natures--of the gross and palpable shocks
daily imparted to them by the details of vice and crime. I have tried
to treat my material lightly and entertainingly, as a true reporter
should, but I would not have my reader suppose that I did not feel
the essential cruelty of an exhibition that tore its poor rags from
all that squalid shame, and its mask from all that lying, cowering
guilt, or did not suspect how it must harden and deprave those whom it
daily entertained. As I dwelt upon the dull visages of the spectators,
certain spectacles vaguely related themselves to what I saw: the women
who sat and knitted at the sessions of the Revolutionary tribunals of
Paris, and overwhelmed with their clamor the judges’ feeble impulses
to mercy; the roaring populace at the Spanish bull-fight and the Roman
arena. Here the same elements were held in absolute silence,--debarred
even from “conversation,”--but it was impossible not to feel that here
in degree were the conditions that trained men to demand blood, to
rave for the guillotine, to turn down the thumb. This procession of
misdeeds, passing under their eyes day after day, must leave a miasm
of moral death behind it which no prison or work-house can hereafter
cure. We all know that the genius of our law is publicity; but it may
be questioned whether criminal trials may not be as profitably kept
private as hangings, the popular attendance on which was once supposed
to be a bulwark of religion and morality.