The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 7

of justice to cultivate the favor of the
attorneys practicing before them, and before whom they might soon be
compelled themselves to practice.
In the higher courts of the land, where juries were unknown and
appointed judges held their seats for life, these awful conditions did not
obtain, and there Justice might have been content to dwell, and there
she actually did sometimes set her foot. Unfortunately, the great judges
had the consciences of their education. They had crept to place through
the slime of the lower courts and their robes of office bore the
damnatory evidence. Unfortunately, too, the attorneys, the jury habit
strong upon them, brought into the superior tribunals the moral
characteristics and professional methods acquired in the lower. Instead
of assisting the judges to ascertain the truth and the law, they cheated in
argument and took liberties with fact, deceiving the court whenever
they deemed it to the interest of their cause to do so, and as willingly
won by a technicality or a trick as by the justice of their contention and
their ability in supporting it. Altogether, the entire judicial system of
the Connected States of America was inefficient, disreputable, corrupt.
The result might easily have been foreseen and doubtless was predicted

by patriots whose admonitions have not come down to us. Denied
protection of the law, neither property nor life was safe. Greed filled his
coffers from the meager hoards of Thrift, private vengeance took the
place of legal redress, mad multitudes rioted and slew with virtual
immunity from punishment or blame, and the land was red with crime.
A singular phenomenon of the time was the immunity of criminal
women. Among the Americans woman held a place unique in the
history of nations. If not actually worshiped as a deity, as some
historians, among them the great Sagab-Joffoy, have affirmed, she was
at least regarded with feelings of veneration which the modern mind
has a difficulty in comprehending. Some degree of compassion for her
mental inferiority, some degree of forbearance toward her infirmities of
temper, some degree of immunity for the offenses which these
peculiarities entail--these are common to all peoples above the grade of
barbarians. In ancient America these chivalrous sentiments found open
and lawful expression only in relieving woman of the burden of
participation in political and military service; the laws gave her no
express exemption from responsibility for crime. When she murdered,
she was arrested; when arrested, brought to trial--though the origin and
meaning of those observances are not now known. Gunkux, whose
researches into the jurisprudence of antiquity enable him to speak with
commanding authority of many things, gives us here nothing better
than the conjecture that the trial of women for murder, in the nineteenth
century and a part of the twentieth, was the survival of an earlier
custom of actually convicting and punishing them, but it seems
extremely improbable that a people that once put its female assassins to
death would ever have relinquished the obvious advantages of the
practice while retaining with purposeless tenacity some of its costly
preliminary forms. Whatever may have been the reason, the custom
was observed with all the gravity of a serious intention. Gunkux
professes knowledge of one or two instances (he does not name his
authorities) where matters went so far as conviction and sentence, and
adds that the mischievous sentimentalists who had always lent
themselves to the solemn jest by protestations of great vraisemblance
against "the judicial killing of women," became really alarmed and
filled the land with their lamentations. Among the phenomena of
brazen effrontery he classes the fact that some of these loud

protagonists of the right of women to assassinate unpunished were
themselves women! Howbeit, the sentences, if ever pronounced, were
never executed, and during the first quarter of the twentieth century the
meaningless custom of bringing female assassins to trial was
abandoned. What the effect was of their exemption from this
considerable inconvenience we have not the data to conjecture, unless
we understand as an allusion to it some otherwise obscure words of the
famous Edward Bok, the only writer of the period whose work has
survived. In his monumental essay on barbarous penology, entitled
"Slapping the Wrist," he couples "woman's emancipation from the
trammels of law" and "man's better prospect of death" in a way that
some have construed as meaning that he regarded them as cause and
effect. It must be said, however, that this interpretation finds no support
in the general character of his writing, which is exceedingly humane,
refined and womanly.
It has been said that the writings of this great man are the only
surviving work of his period, but of that we are not altogether sure.
There exists a fragment of an anonymous essay on woman's legal
responsibility which many