The Integrity of the Courts
By L. A. S.
It has long been known that legislators and executive officers were susceptible to the corrupting influence of bribes, and that such an influence has often been exerted in these two departments of civil government by unscrupulous men to gain unjust ends. The question has now been raised as to whether the remaining department of the government—the courts—is above such influences, or whether it too can at times become the instrument of unscrupulous wealth. For venturing to assert that this is true in a specific case two Missouri editors were recently arrested and punished on a charge of contempt of court. The case was one in which a verdict of fifteen thousand dollars had been obtained against a railway company by an employee named Oglesby, who in an accident had lost one of his limbs. After several appeals and a rehearing, in all of which the verdict was affirmed, another appeal was made, and the verdict was set aside, and, so it is stated, no new trial was ordered, this extraordinary outcome being due, it is said, to the fact that during the long delay obtained by these various appeals the complexion of the court had been entirely changed by electing railroad attorneys to its membership. Thereupon the Warrensburg Herald declared that the court had “reversed and stultified itself in this case until no sane man can have any other opinion but that the judges who concurred in the opinion dismissing the Oglesby case have been bought in the interest of the railroad.” For this “contempt of court” the editor was fined five hundred dollars and costs, another editor who copied the Herald editorial being let off with a nominal fine only because he retracted it, and made an apology to the court. From such facts it is easy to see how autocratic power is swiftly springing up in this government. The liberties of the people depend upon the free exercise of the will of the people, and this in turn, depends upon the right of freedom of speech, through which public sentiment is directed toward what are believed to be the ends of justice. There can be no freedom without the right of criticism. No human being is above criticism. The officers of the courts are men, of the same mold and stamp as are the members of the legislatures, or other men, the criticism of whose acts is not thought of as being criminal. The extraordinary power of the courts represented in contempt proceedings was conferred upon them not as a declaration that human nature is different in a judge from human nature in other men, and that a judge by virtue of his office is raised altogether above the weaknesses and temptations by which other men are led astray, but only as a means of enforcing decrees of the courts made in the interests of justice. But apparently it is of little value now to enumerate or discuss the theories and principles upon which free popular government is based. Men have become intoxicated with power, and in many cases seek only to gain their selfish ends by the exercise of their power, whether in accordance with just principles or in spite of them. And out of this condition of things what but the development of an autocratic form of government is to be expected?