Young Holcombe was an earnest member of every reform club and citizens’ league, and his distinguished name gave weight as a director to charitable organizations and free kindergartens.  He had inherited his hatred of Tammany Hall, and was unrelenting in his war upon it and its handiwork, and he spoke of it and of its immediate downfall with the bated breath of one who, though amazed at the wickedness of the thing he fights, is not discouraged nor afraid.  And he would listen to no half-measures.  Had not his grandfather quarrelled with Henry Clay, and so shaken the friendship of a lifetime, because of a great compromise which he could not countenance?  And was his grandson to truckle and make deals with this hideous octopus that was sucking the life-blood from the city’s veins?  Had he not but yesterday distributed six hundred circulars, calling for honest government, to six hundred possible voters, all the way up Fourth Avenue?—­and when some flippant one had said that he might have hired a messenger-boy to have done it for him and so saved his energies for something less mechanical, he had rebuked the speaker with a reproachful stare and turned away in silence.

Life was terribly earnest to young Holcombe, and he regarded it from the point of view of one who looks down upon it from the judge’s bench, and listens with a frown to those who plead its cause.  He was not fooled by it; he was alive to its wickedness and its evasions.  He would tell you that he knew for a fact that the window man in his district was a cousin of the Tammany candidate, and that the contractor who had the cleaning of the street to do was a brother-in-law of one of the Hall’s sachems, and that the policeman on his beat had not been in the country eight months.  He spoke of these damning facts with the air of one who simply tells you that much, that you should see how terrible the whole thing really was, and what he could tell if he wished.

In his own profession he recognized the trials of law-breakers only as experiments which went to establish and explain a general principle.  And prisoners were not men to him, but merely the exceptions that proved the excellence of a rule.  Holcombe would defend the lowest creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished to see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a case.  Of one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own, said, when he sentenced him, “Were there many more such men as you in the world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left childless.”  And when some one asked Holcombe, with ill-concealed disgust, how he came to defend the man, he replied:  “I wished to show the unreliability of expert testimony from medical men.  Yes; they tell me the man was a very bad lot.”

It was measures, not men, to Holcombe, and law and order were his twin goddesses, and “no compromise” his watchword.