istinction
of persons, listened patiently to the complaint, tried to arrange the
affairs amicably, and when his efforts failed, gave his decision at
once according to law and common-sense. No attention was paid to rank
or social position. A general who would not attend to the police
regulations was fined like an ordinary workingman, and in a dispute
between a great dignitary and a man of the people the two were treated
in precisely the same way. No wonder such courts became popular among
the masses; and their popularity was increased when it became known
that the affairs were disposed of expeditiously, without unnecessary
formalities and without any bribes or blackmail. Many peasants regarded
the justice as they had been wont to regard kindly proprietors of the
old patriarchal type, and brought their griefs and sorrows to him in
the hope that he would somehow alleviate them. Often they submitted
most intimate domestic and matrimonial concerns of which no court could
possibly take cognisance, and sometimes they demanded the fulfilment of
contracts which were in flagrant contradiction not only with the written
law, but also with ordinary morality.*

* Many curious instances of this have come to my knowledge,
but they are of such a kind that they cannot be quoted in a
work intended for the general public.

Of course, the courts were not entirely without blemishes. In the
matter, for example, of making no distinction of persons some of the
early justices, in seeking to avoid Scylla, came dangerously near to
Charybdis. Imagining that their mission was to eradicate the conceptions
and habits which had been created and fostered by serfage, they
sometimes used their authority for giving lessons in philanthropic
liberalism, and took a malicious delight in wounding the
susceptibilities, and occasionally even the material interests, of those
whom they regarded as enemies to the good cause. In disputes between
master and servant, or between employer and workmen, the justice of this
type considered it his duty to resist the tyranny of capital, and was
apt to forget his official character of judge in his assumed character
of social reformer. Happily these aberrations on the part of the
justices are already things of the past, but they helped to bring about
a reaction, as we shall see presently.

The extreme popularity of the Justice of Peace Courts did not last very
long. Their history resembled that of the Zemstvo