Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/105

Rh man was of equal stature; bond or free, one stood before it naked of influence, and with his shoulder made as high as the shoulder of his fellow.

This is the theory. If it fails, it is because the law at best is but a human device, and its servants, after all, are but men like the others.

The building in which the Federal Court held its session was a substantial, handsome structure, and maintained a strange contrast to the town in which it stood. The town was rough, miserable, uncouth; the temporary habitation of men, struggling ever with the relentless anankè of things; in equal contrast to the officers of this court was the audience in the great court-room. They were the pioneers of civilization; a motley crowd in which the best and worst of human society was mixed and intermixed. They were, for the most part, bronzed, bearded, fearless examples of the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest, but not all. Some were the reckless advance agents of those hardy vices that follow close in the wake of empire,—devils too villainous to be tolerated in the cities of the East, and too