Anyone who has witnessed even so much as a traffic-court trial cannothelp but realize that "government by law instead of man" is a merepolitical phrase without meaning in reality. The ascendancy ofme-and-mine over you-and-yours runs so deep in the human psyche thatabstract idealisms must always take second place where such ascendancyis threatened. Thus we see that the belly-crawler, meek and subservientto the judge, comes off with a token sentence while the man who attemptsto maintain his pride, his rights, his self-respect gets the book thrownat him.
No practical attorney is unaware that the judgment of his case dependslargely upon who presides, the whims, the prejudices, the moods, theviewpoint of the judge; and that the law merely provides justificationfor the imposition of those whims, moods, prejudices, and viewpoints.
And ambitions.
The announcement at E.H.Q. that a Junior E would be given this problemgave Gunderson's man the opening he had hoped to find. A hurried call tothe capitol and a brief conversation with Gunderson himself confirmedhis conclusions. Perhaps the E was above all law, and it might not beexpedient to challenge that right now, but immunity did not necessarilyextend to the Junior E.
In view of the known ambitions of certain judges, it should not bedifficult to make a test case of this--whether the E's had a right tojeopardize a colony of human beings by assigning an unqualified man tothe problem.
A question, too, of who had jurisdiction over the Juniors, theapprentices, the students. How far down the line did the mantle of the Eextend to protect those not yet qualified? How far out did theAdministration of E.H.Q. extend to substitute for government? How muchof a state within a state had E.H.Q. become?
Now, while the public was clamoring for action, and E.H.Q. was, instead,droning on through a mass of inconsequential detail, now while publicsentiment was crystallizing, or could be crystallized into placing humanwelfare over science procedures, now was the time.
It was not difficult to find a judge who was predisposed to favor therequest of the attorney general.