I should add that the incident so affected his confidence the next day in court that we won our case without difficulty.
But to return to the unfortunate McDuff.

To my great astonishment and still more so to that of my partner the Court of Appeals handed down an opinion sustaining my contention and holding his client's conviction to be illegal.

That night Gottlieb and I, sitting in his office, shook our sides with laughter at the idea of having hoodwinked the greatest court in the State into a solemn opinion that a rogue should not be punished if at the same time he could persuade his victim to try to be a rogue also! But there it was in cold print.

They had followed my reasoning absolutely and even adopted as their own some of the language used in my brief.

Does any one of my readers doubt me, let him read the report of a like case in the forty-sixth volume of the reports of the Court of Appeals of New York, at page four hundred and seventy.
Said the Court: "The prosecutor"-- Jones--"parted with his property as an inducement to a supposed officer to violate the law and his duties; and if in attempting to do this he has been defrauded the law will not punish his confederate, although such confederate may have been instrumental in inducing the commission of the offence.
Neither the law nor public policy designs the protection of rogues in their dealings with each other, or to insure fair dealing and truthfulness, as between each other, in their dishonest practices." (This sentence had been in my brief.) "The design of the law is to protect those who, for some _honest_ purpose, are induced upon false and fraudulent representations to give credit or part with their property to another, and not to protect those who, for _unworthy_ or illegal purposes, part with their goods." "Why, Quib," quoth Gottlieb, "you are the discoverer of a new legal principle.