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decidedly decrepit Chinese mandarin--and a court stenographer.
Judge Wilbur Payderson, a lean herring of a man, who had sat in this case originally as the
examining judge when Cowperwood had been indicted by the grand jury, and who had bound
him over for trial at this term, was a peculiarly interesting type of judge, as judges go. He was so
meager and thin-blooded that he was arresting for those qualities alone. Technically, he was
learned in the law; actually, so far as life was concerned, absolutely unconscious of that subtle
chemistry of things that transcends all written law and makes for the spirit and, beyond that, the
inutility of all law, as all wise judges know. You could have looked at his lean, pedantic body, his
frizzled gray hair, his fishy, blue-gray eyes, without any depth of speculation in them, and his
nicely modeled but unimportant face, and told him that he was without imagination; but he
would not have believed you--would have fined you for contempt of court. By the careful
garnering of all his little opportunities, the furbishing up of every meager advantage; by listening
slavishly to the voice of party, and following as nearly as he could the behests of intrenched
property, he had reached his present state. It was not very far along, at that. His salary was only
six thousand dollars a year. His little fame did not extend beyond the meager realm of local
lawyers and judges. But the sight of his name quoted daily as being about his duties, or
rendering such and such a decision, was a great satisfaction to him. He thought it made him a
significant figure in the world. "Behold I am not as other men," he often thought, and this
comforted him. He was very much flattered when a prominent case came to his calendar; and
as he sat enthroned before the various litigants and lawyers he felt, as a rule, very significant
indeed. Now and then some subtlety of life would confuse his really limited intellect; but in all
such cases there was the letter of the law. He could hunt in the reports to find out what really
thinking men had decided. Besides, lawyers everywhere are so subtle. They put the rules of
law, favorable or unfavorable, under the judge's thumb and nose. "Your honor, in the thirty-
second volume of the Revised Reports of Massachusetts, page so and so, line so and so, in
Arundel versus Bannerman, you will find, etc." How often have you heard that in a court of law?
The reasoning that is left to do in most cases is not much. And the sanctity of the law is raised
like a great banner by which the pride of the incumbent is strengthened.
Payderson, as Steger had indicated, could scarcely be pointed to as an unjust judge. He was a
party judge--Republican in principle, or rather belief, beholden to the dominant party councils for
his personal continuance in office, and as such willing and anxious to do whatever he
considered that he reasonably could do to further the party welfare and the private interests of
his masters. Most people never trouble to look into the mechanics of the thing they call their
conscience too closely. Where they do, too often they lack the skill to disentangle the tangled
threads of ethics and morals. Whatever the opinion of the time is, whatever the weight of great
interests dictates, that they conscientiously believe. Some one has since invented the phrase "a
corporation-minded judge." There are many such.
Payderson was one. He fairly revered property and power. To him Butler and Mollenhauer and
Simpson were great men--reasonably sure to be right always because they were so powerful.
This matter of Cowperwood's and Stener's defalcation he had long heard of. He knew by
associating with one political light and another just what the situation was. The party, as the
leaders saw it, had been put in a very bad position by Cowperwood's subtlety. He had led
Stener astray--more than an ordinary city treasurer should have been led astray--and, although
Stener was primarily guilty as the original mover in the scheme, Cowperwood was more so for
having led him imaginatively to such disastrous lengths. Besides, the party needed a
scapegoat--that was enough for Payderson, in the first place. Of course, after the election had
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