The district attorney knows Robinson is guilty, and so does everybody else, including Robinson.  At last this presumably innocent man is brought to the bar for trial.  The jury scan his hang-dog countenance upon which guilt is plainly written.  They contrast his appearance with that of the honest Jones.  They know he has been accused, held by a magistrate, indicted by a grand jury, and that his case, after careful scrutiny, has been pressed for trial by the public prosecutor.  Do they really presume him innocent?  Of course not.  They presume him guilty.  “So soon as I see him come through dot leetle door in the back of the room, then I know he’s guilty!” as the foreman said in the old story.  What good does the presumption of innocence, so called, do for the miserable Robinson?  None whatever—­save perhaps to console him in the long days pending his trial.  But such a legal hypocrisy could never have deceived anybody.  How much better it would be to cast aside all such cant and frankly admit that the attitude of the continental law toward the man under arrest is founded upon common sense and the experience of mankind.  If he is the wrong man it should not be difficult for him to demonstrate the fact.  At any rate circumstances are against him, and he should be anxious to explain them away if he can.

The fact of the matter is, that in dealing with practical conditions, police methods differ very little in different countries.  The authorities may perhaps keep considerably more detailed “tabs” on people in Europe than in the United States, but if they are once caught in a compromising position they experience about the same treatment wherever they happen to be.  In France (and how the apostles of liberty condemn the iniquity of the administration of criminal justice in that country!) the suspect or undesirable receives a polite official call or note, in which he is invited to leave the locality as soon as convenient.  In New York he is arrested by a plainclothes man, yanked down to Mulberry Street for the night, and next afternoon is thrust down the gangplank of a just departing Fall River liner.  Many an inspector has earned unstinted praise (even from the New York Evening Post) by “clearing New York of crooks” or having a sort of “round-up” of suspicious characters whom, after proper identification, he has ejected from the city by the shortest and quickest possible route.  Yet in the case of every person thus arrested and driven out of the town he has undoubtedly violated constitutional rights and taken the law into his own hands.

What redress can a penniless tramp secure against a stout inspector of police able and willing to spend a considerable sum of money in his own defence, and with the entire force ready and eager to get at the tramp and put him out of business?  He swallows his pride, if he has any, and ruefully slinks out of town for a period of enforced abstinence from the joys of metropolitan existence.  Yet who shall say that, in spite of the fact that it is a theoretic outrage upon liberty, this cleaning out of the city is not highly desirable?  One or two comparatively innocent men may be caught in the ruck, but they generally manage to intimate to the police that the latter have “got them wrong” and duly make their escape.  The others resume their tramp from city to city, clothed in the presumption of their innocence.