The Editor's Bag may not have prevented able men in and around New York from accepting appointments to the Federal bench, but the danger of belittling the dignity of courts and of obstructing justice by incapacity is ever present, and one for which the American public needs to be continually on its guard. JUDICIAL "GRAFT" IN PERSIA "When I was in the service of his Majesty the Shah of Persia," said Colonel Mesrop Nevton, Khan, in an address in New York last month, "I saw many women coming to the imperial palace, veiled, to ask for justice. The skill which women have obtained in looking after their affairs I saw illustrated one day at the palace of the Archbishop, as I will call him. He was the son-in-law of the Shah. An old woman came, whose husband had taken a young and pretty wife, and died very suddenly soon afterward, when it was found that the young wife had possession of all the property and the old wife was even to be driven from the house. "'Yes,' said the Archbishop, 'I will do everything I can for you, but first you must give me $500.' "'I will give you more than $500 when I get my property, but now I haven't a cent,' pleaded the woman. "But she'^wept and pleaded in vain, and finally went off to try to get the $500, or a present which would be the equivalent. "'I had to tell her to give me $500,' said the Archbishop to me in a whisper, 'for I have already taken $500 from the young wife.' "You talk of 'graft' in New York," inter polated the Colonel, "but you want to go to Persia to see it in its refined condition. All this was done in open court." A HUNG JURY A New York lawyer says that not long ago he was engaged to aid in the defense of a man on trial in a small New England town. The New Yorker was anxious to get back to the city, and pushed the case as much as possible, with the happy result that the jury
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retired by one o'clock. The evidence had been conclusive, and a verdict for the defendant should have been ren dered in a few minutes, but the darkness arrived without a sign from the juryroom. There was nothing else for it, after the judge had ascertained that the jury desired no instruction in the law, but to adjourn the court until the next day. The next morning eleven weary men and one with a dogged look upon his face filed into the jury box. The dogged man was the foreman. "Have you reached a decision, gen tlemen?" the Clerk asked. "No, we ain't!" the foreman said, glaring at the eleven. "We can't come to no verdict. I have, but there's eleven plumb fools on this 'ere jury!" Recorder Picquet imposed a fine of $30,000,000 upon each one of seven Negroes at Augusta, Ga., Feb. 12, for violating the health ordinances. When the laughter in the court-room had subsided he suspended sentence on condition that each one of the defendants deposited a dollar with the clerk.
IS THERE A LAW OF FACTS? In his edition of Best's Principles of the Law of Evidence, Mr. Charles F. Chamberlayne says that "the need for insistence upon a dominating influence for scientific principle in the treatment of evidence was seldom, if ever, greater than at the present time." Commenting on Mr. Chamberlayne' s views, a reviewer of the work named says (7 Michigan Law Review 366, Feb.) : His indictment charges the confusion of the law of evidence, which is a branch of the adjective law, concerned only with the es tablishing of facts judicially, with rules of substantive law which themselves are con cerned only with the definition of rights and obligations. And it involves further the charge that the judge in our modern practice has become subordinated to the jury in the
