Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/220

 stood when inaugurated President of the United States. The old blue ornamentation of the ceiling, studded with stars, had recently, with the worst of judgment, been ruined by the insertion of glass knobs for lights. Ere long, I was called upon to preside over the court of quarter sessions which sat in the west room on the first floor, which for nearly ten years had been the meeting place of the House of Representatives of the United States. There Lyon and Griswold, two New England congressmen, in 1798, had spat in each other's faces and beaten each other with clubs and pokers, and later Probst had been tried for murder. After the court had been opened upon my first day, the case of a man charged with larceny was called and he was convicted. I imposed an imprisonment of eight months in the county prison and a fine of ten dollars. Then one of the court officers came up to me and quietly whispered:

“Judge, the other older judges never impose fines in these cases.”

“Do they not?” I said, “then they fail in their duty.”

I had remembered that the statute made the sentence obligatory and gave no discretion to the judges. All through my service as a judge these fines were imposed for such crimes, although it very seldom happened that they could be collected and the practice caused considerable trouble to the prison authorities. The plunge had been taken, the court officers never again ventured critical suggestions, and no serious trouble ever arose in the determination of the causes. The life of a judge is a reversal of the Canterbury pilgrimages. He sits still while the world, with its burden of interests and hopes, woes and emotions, passes in review before him, and he sees the strifes of the mart, the scandals of the alleys and the skeletons of the closets in all of their phases. It is not, however, as broad a field as it otherwise would be because both bench and bar, together with the growth of legal learning, have followed the bent of certain narrow developments of 206