In view of this deliberate perversion of truth and morals, the euphemisms of a hard-put defendant’s counsel when he pictures a chorus girl as an angel and a coarse bounder as a St. George seem innocent indeed.  It is not within the rail of the courtroom but within the pages of these sensational journals that justice is made a farce.  The phrase “contempt of court” has ceased practically to have any significance whatever.  The front pages teem with caricatures of the judge upon the bench, of the individual jurors with exaggerated heads upon impossible bodies, of the lawyers ranting and bellowing, juxtaposed with sketches of the defendant praying beside his prison cot or firing the fatal shot in obedience to a message borne by an angel from on high.

How long would the “unwritten law” play any part in the administration of criminal justice if every paper in the land united in demanding, not only in its editorials, but upon its front pages, that private vengeance must cease?  Let the “yellow” newspapers confine themselves simply to an accurate report of the evidence at the trial, with a reiterated insistence that the law must take its course.  Let them stop pandering to those morbid tastes which they have themselves created.  Let the “Sympathy Sisters,” the photographer, and the special artist be excluded from the court-room.  When these things are done, we shall have the same high standard of efficiency upon the part of the jury in great murder trials that we have in other cases.

CHAPTER IV

Why Do Men Kill?

When a shrewd but genial editor called me up on the telephone and asked me how I should like to write an article on the above lurid title, I laughed in his—­I mean the telephone’s face.

“My dear fellow!” I said (I should only have the nerve to call him that over a wire).  It would ruin me!  How could I keep my self-respect and write that kind of sensational stuff—­Why do men kill?  Why do men eat?  Why do men drink?  Why do men love?  Why do men—­”

“Look here!” he interrupted.  I want to know why one man kills another man.  If we knew why, maybe we could stop it, couldn’t we?  We could try to, anyhow.  And you know something about it.  You’ve prosecuted nearly a hundred men for murder.  Get the facts—­that’s what I want.  Cut the adjectives and morality, and get down to the reasons.  Anything particularly undignified about that?” And he rang off.

I arose and walked over to the bookcase on which reposed several shelves of “minutes” of criminal trials.  They were dusty and depressing.  Practically every one of them was a memento of some poor devil gone to prison or to the chair.  Where were they now—­and why did they kill—­yes, why did they?

I glanced along the red-labeled backs.