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As far as Hillstrom is concerned, if his plea be true, his conduct was both natural and honorable; and his plea does not sound farfetched to me because I had a parallel experience mysself. During the teamster's strike in San Francisco in 1900, there was very little police protection in the residential district, burglaries were frequent, and householders armed themselves and became trigger-nervous. I was one night shot at twice as a burglar, and if I had been hit I should have had to plead guilty to attmepted burglary, to save a girl.

Also my business, that of a writer, leads me to look for something entirely different than the obvious. In every field the obvious and the real are so at varience that if I were on a jury, circumstantial evidence would have to pin a crime down at one possible man before I should agree to the death sentence. There have been too many mistakes.

As far as this man's guilt goes, I admit that one's opinion will be largely a matter of personal bias; but I fear if he is shot, the fact that the attoneys he discharged were reappointed by the court against his will, will go into the balance of Labor's prejudice against law. This report contradicts iteself when it says that he agreed to their acting for him after he had discharged them. His attitude is clear; "I want the court to understand that my position is final. I do not object to counsel remaining in court; anybody can remain."

I have a brother who is a judge in Indiana, and if here were to act as this judge acted, I should know that he did absolutely the right thing as he saw it; but not knowing this judge, if one comes to me and says that the judge, the prosecuting attorney, and the defendent's counsel were all in collusion to rail-road Hillstrom for his activities in the cause of labor, why this report would itself bear out this latter theory. Feeling that this case is far more important from its general than from its particular bearing, I think it would be bad poicy to shoot the man while there is a reasonable doubt that he is guilty, and while the report shows that the court forced unsatisfactory counsel upon him.

I really did not intend to argue; but as I meet so many who do not