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it now?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said.
    â€œThen where is the principle in your belief in their innocence?”
    â€œI don’t know. Am I supposed to have principles? You knew me the way I used to be, Emma, a long time ago. Should that produce principles?”
    What he wanted to say after that eluded him, and he felt ashamed of bringing up the past in so childish a manner. He stabbed at his food and found that he no longer desired it, and he was almost grateful to Emma when she poured him a cup of coffee. “Thank you,” he said, contritely, and then became angry again when he realized that she was feeling sorry for him, sorry she had ever brought up the matter of the petition: He didn’t want sympathy; he did what was right: suddenly, he told himself that and then in the saying it collapsed like a pricked balloon. His friend, Joe Martin the gambler, always said that you played the game to win and didn’t count the stakes; but that was as childish as anything else, and even his friend Martin worshipped sincerely at the foot of a sort of perverted honesty, not holding his life much higher than a so-called debt of honor, whatever his honor was. Was there a pattern in his life concerning men who were good—in the accepted sense of the word—and did he despise such men? Of course he hadn’t put his name to the petition; what good would it have done, in his own terms? He was a judge. He sat on the bench, enforcing the law, whether it was good law or bad law, just law or unjust law—and how well he knew that law and justice were things apart—and yet when he rendered a decision, did he stand on principle or the letter of the law? It was not a good world he inhabited; he had only to look around Chicago to see that, he had only to look back in his own memory to see what the world did to the weak, the small, and even to the strong who were not strong enough; yet hadn’t he long ago decided that it was the best of all possible worlds? Hadn’t he fought on that belief, up and up, step by step, proving the legend of America and making himself almost a caricature of that legend, a judge in a graystone house? Not, it is true, one of those like Field, or Armour, or McCormick—he had a different memory from theirs and he couldn’t elude it entirely, and to prove that he had written a book, Our Penal Machinery and its Victims. Even if his desire to understand what makes criminal men was no more virtuous than Armour’s desire to understand what makes sick cattle, as some of his enemies said, he was nevertheless interested in men and believed that crime could be cured as well as punished. But was that principle, or was the only principle that of the advancement of Judge Altgeld within the only frame he knew?
    His wife said that she was sorry. “Now I’m sorry,” she said. “Why did I mention that? Why don’t we forget about the anarchists? Finish your breakfast, please.”
    He pushed his plate away. He knew the gesture displeased her; it was not right, it was an old, bad habit of his. And his wife said, more hotly:
    â€œIt’s become like a sickness here in Chicago, this whole business of the anarchists. It’s in our blood now, it seems.”
    â€œMaybe it is a sickness.”
    â€œSometimes I would want to live anywhere, anywhere but here.”
    The Judge said, “Here? This is what I am. I came here with nothing. I think a man who had nothing once, he tries to forget it, but he can’t. Maybe Chicago is like a mother for me, so I could excuse this or that, and say, it’s Chicago.”

VI
    They said of Chicago then, in one of those pat phrases which have as little truth as substance, that it killed pigs and made men; but not long after Pete Altgeld came, he saw the men killed along with the pigs, and if there was a repugnance toward eating the flesh of one, that about limited the ethic. Pete Altgeld could have been