The persons and institutions of our judicial system with which I was in the first instance concerned gave my youthful conceptions more material for criticism than for respect.  The practical education of the Auscultator began with keeping the minutes of the Criminal Courts, and to this post I was promoted out of my proper turn by the Rath, Herr von Brauchitsch, under whom I worked, because in those days I wrote a more than usually quick and legible hand.  On the examinations, as criminal proceedings in the inquisitorial method of that day were called, the one that has made the most lasting impression upon me related to a widely ramifying association in Berlin for the purpose of unnatural vice.  The club arrangements of the accomplices, the agenda books, the levelling effect through all classes of a common pursuit of the forbidden—­all this, even in 1835, pointed to a demoralization in no whit less than that evidenced by the proceedings against the Heinzes, husband and wife, in October, 1891.  The ramifications of this society extended even into the highest circles.  It was ascribed to the influence of Prince Wittgenstein that the reports of the case were demanded from the Ministry of Justice, and were never returned—­at least, during the time I served on the tribunal.

After I had been keeping the records for four months, I was transferred to the City Court, before which civil causes are tried, and was suddenly promoted from the mechanical occupation of writing from dictation to an independent post, which, having regard to my inexperience and my sentiments, made my position difficult.  The first stage in which the legal novice was called to a more independent sphere of activity was in connection with divorce proceedings.  Obviously regarded as the least important, they were entrusted to the most incapable Rath, Praetorius by name, and under him were left to the tender mercies of unfledged Auscultators, who had to make upon this corpus vile their first experiments in the part of judges—­of course, under the nominal responsibility of Herr Praetorius, who nevertheless took no part in their proceedings.  By way of indicating this gentleman’s character, it was told to us young people that when, in the course of a sitting, he was roused from a light slumber to give his vote, he used to say, “I vote with my colleague Tempelhof”—­whereupon it was sometimes necessary to point out to him that Herr Tempelhof was not present.

On one occasion I represented to him my embarrassment at having, though only a few months more than twenty years old, to undertake the attempt at a reconciliation between an agitated couple:  a matter crowned, according to my view, with a certain ecclesiastical and moral “nimbus,” with which in my state of mind I did not feel able to cope.  I found Praetorius in the irritable mood of an old man awakened at an untimely moment, who had besides all the aversion of an old bureaucrat to a young man of birth.