Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/122

Rh A cry, an old woman’s shriek, rang out from the rear of the room. There was nothing so very extraordinary about that. Our courts are held in public; and every now and then somebody makes a disturbance such as this old woman made when she rose now with that cry on her lips, and, tearing her hair and rending her garments, began to beat her head against the wall. It was the duty of the bailiff to put the person out, and that officer in this court moved to do his duty.

But the man on the bench was Ben B. Lindsey, the celebrated Judge of the Juvenile Court of Denver. He wasn’t celebrated then; he had no Juvenile Court. He was only a young lawyer and politician who, for political services (some aver, falsely, for delivering a vote for a United States Senatorship) had been appointed to fill out an unexpired term as County Judge. Lindsey didn’t want to be a judge; he had asked for the district-attorneyship. His experiences on the inside of politics had shown him that many things were wrong, and he had a private theory that the way to set the evils right was to enforce the law, as the law. But another man, Harry A. Lindsley, had a prior claim on the district-attorneyship, and Ben Lindsey had to take the judgeship or nothing. So he had taken it (January 8, 1901), and he had been administering justice—as