tem--Justices of the Peace and Monthly Sessions--The
Regular Tribunals--Court of Revision--Modification of the Original
Plan--How Does the System Work?--Rapid Acclimatisation--The Bench--The
Jury--Acquittal of Criminals Who Confess Their Crimes--Peasants,
Merchants, and Nobles as Jurymen--Independence and Political
Significance of the New Courts.

After serf-emancipation and local self-government, the subject which
demanded most urgently the attention of reformers was the judicial
organisation, which had sunk to a depth of inefficiency and corruption
difficult to describe.

In early times the dispensation of justice in Russia, as in other States
of a primitive type, had a thoroughly popular character. The State
was still in its infancy, and the duty of defending the person, the
property, and the rights of individuals lay, of necessity, chiefly on
the individuals themselves. Self-help formed the basis of the judicial
procedure, and the State merely assisted the individual to protect his
rights and to avenge himself on those who voluntarily infringed them.

By the rapid development of the Autocratic Power all this was changed.
Autocracy endeavoured to drive and regulate the social machine by
its own unaided force, and regarded with suspicion and jealousy all
spontaneous action in the people. The dispensation of justice was
accordingly appropriated by the central authority, absorbed into the
Administration, and withdrawn from public control. Themis retired
from the market-place, shut herself up in a dark room from which
the contending parties and the public gaze were rigorously excluded,
surrounded herself with secretaries and scribes who put the rights and
claims of the litigants into whatever form they thought proper, weighed
according to her own judgment the arguments presented to her by her
own servants, and came forth from her seclusion merely to present a
ready-made decision or to punish the accused whom she considered guilty.

This change, though perhaps to some extent necessary, was attended with
very bad consequences. Freed from the control of the contending parties
and of the public, the courts acted as uncontrolled human nature
generally does. Injustice, extortion, bribery, and corruption assumed
gigantic proportions, and against these evils the Government found no
better remedy than a system of complicated formalities and ingenious
checks. The judicial functionaries were hedged in by a multitude of
regula