_Le Pli
Professionnel_ (1909), by Marcel Lestranger, a provincial magistrate. It
is very pertinent to our subject. It shows plainly that the magistracy
nowadays, both the qualified stipendiaries and the bench of magistrates,
has lost all confidence in itself and is terrified of public opinion as
represented by newspapers, associations, political clubs and the man in
the street; the magistrate knows too, or thinks he knows, that promotion
depends, not on a reputation for severity as it used to do, but on a
reputation for indulgence.

He is confronted in the execution of his duty by forces which are always
in coalition against him; the public, almost always favourable to the
accused, the press, both local and Parisian, the so-called science of
judicial medicine, which is almost always disposed to consider the
accused as persons not responsible for their actions. He lives, too, in
constant terror of being mixed up in a miscarriage of justice, for
miscarriage of justice is now a sort of craze, and with a considerable
section of the public every conviction is a miscarriage of justice. And
so the magistrate of first instance never dares to sum up severely, and
the stipendiary never dares press his interrogations with firmness.

There are exceptions of course; but these exceptions, by the
astonishment which they excite, and by the reaction to which they give
rise, show sufficiently, indeed conclusively, that they are abnormal,
outside the new order of things, outside the new habits of the people.

More often than not the subordinate magistrate, whose business it is to
commit the prisoner for trial, acts with timidity and reserve,
apologetically attenuating the crime; he leaves loopholes of escape,
appeals in audible asides for indulgence, dwells on the uncertainty of
evidence. He demands indeed the prisoner's head but lives in terror lest
he obtain it.

The fact is what both he and the stipendiary desire is that the affair
should be settled by an acquittal, for an affair settled by an
acquittal is an affair buried. Stone-dead has no fellow; it is consigned
to oblivion. It can never be made the sort of affair which someone is
sure to declare is a miscarriage of justice, or which someone, animated
by private and political spite or merely for the sake of a jest, can
make into a ghost to haunt for ten or even fifteen years the unfortunate
magistrate who had to deal with it.

M. Lestranger tells a story which, from all the inf