"Laws are also of use," said my good master. "But they are not just and can never be so, for the judge assures to his fellow men the enjoyment of the goods that belong to them, without distinction between the beneficial and the hurtful: this distinction is not found in the rules of the game, but in the book of Divine justice only, wherein no one may read. Do you know the story of the angel and the anchorite? An angel came down to earth with the face of a man and the dress of a pilgrim; making his way through Egypt. He knocked, at eventide, at the door of a good anchorite, who, taking him for a traveller, gave him supper, and wine from a golden cup. Then he made him lie down on his bed whilst he laid himself on the ground on some handfuls of maize-straw. While he slept his celestial guest rose up, took the cup out of which he had drunk, and, hiding it under his cloak, fled away. He acted thus, not meaning any ill-will towards the good hermit, but, on the contrary, in the interest of the host who had given him such a charitable welcome. For he knew that this cup would have been the undoing of the holy man, who had put his heart into its keeping, whereas God desires us to love none but Him and does not brook that a man, devoted to religion, should attach himself to the things of this world. The angel who had his share of Divine wisdom, distinguished between goods that are good and goods that are not. Judges do not make this distinction. Who knows but what Madame Josse may not lose her soul along with the lappets of lace her servant took, and which the judges have given back?"
"In the meanwhile," said the little official, rubbing his hands, "there is now a hussy the less in this world."
He shook the crumbs from his coat, bowed to those present, and went off jauntily.
XXI
JUSTICE (continued)
y good master, turning to me, continued in this manner:
"I only related the story of the angel and the hermit to show the abyss which separates the temporal from the spiritual. Now it is only in things temporal that human justice is exercised, and it is on a low plane where high principles are not in favour. The cruellest offence that could be possibly be done our Lord Jesus Christ is to place His image in the courts of law, where judges pardon Pharisees who crucified Him, and condemn the Magdalene whom He raised up with His Divine hands. What does He—the Just One—among these men, who are unable to show themselves just, even should they wish to, because their melancholy duty is to consider the actions of their fellows, not for what they are in their essence, but merely from the point of view of the social interest; that is to say, on account of this mass of egoism, avarice, error, and abuse which go to the making of cities, and of which they are the purblind guardians. In weighing a fault they add to it the weight of fear or anger it inspired in the cowardly public. And all this is written in their book in such wise that the ancient reading and dead letter stand in the stead of intelligence, heart, and a living soul. And all these regulations, some of which go back to the infamous time of Byzantium and Theodora, agree on this one point only, that all must be perpetuated—virtues and vices alike, in a society which has no desire for change. A fault, in itself, is of so little account in the eyes of the law, and the surrounding circumstances are so considerable, that the selfsame act allowable in one case becomes unpardonable in another, as is shown in the instance of a slap in the face, which, given by one man to another appears simply, in the case of a bourgeois, the effect of an irascible temper, but, for a soldier, becomes a crime punishable by death. This barbarity, which still exists, will be our shame in centuries to come. We reck little of it, but one day they will ask each other what sort of savages we can have been to send a man to his death for a generous warmth of blood springing from his heart when he is bound by law to suffer the perils of war and the miseries of barrack-life. And it is clear that, if there were such a thing as justice, we should not have two codes, one military, the other civil. This military justice, whose results one sees daily, is atrociously cruel; and men, if they ever establish law and order, will never believe that formerly, in times of peace, courts-martial avenged the majesty of corporals and sergeants by the death of a man. They will not believe that unfortunate beings were ordered to be shot for the crime of desertion before the enemy, in an expedition where the government of France itself did not recognise a state of war. What is to be wondered at is that such atrocities are committed by Christian people who do honour to St. Sebastian, a mutinous soldier; and to those martyrs of the Theban legion, whose sole glory is having, in a former age, incurred the severity of courts-martial in refusing to fight against the Bagaudes. But enough of this, let us talk no more of the justice of these gentlemen of the sword, who will perish one day according to the prophecy of the Son of God; let us return to our civil magistrates.
"Judges search not the reins, neither do they read the heart of man, and their justest justice is rude and superficial. All the more then must they cling to this coarse skin of the law on which the codes are inscribed. They are men—that is to say weak and corruptible, gentle to the strong, and pitiless to the weak. They sanction, by their judgments, the cruellest social iniquities, and it is difficult to distinguish, in this partiality, what comes from their personal baseness from what is imposed on them by their duty to their profession; which duty is, in reality, to uphold the State in what is evil as well as in what is good; to see that public morality remains unaltered, whether excellent or detestable; and to assure the rights of citizens along with the tyrannical desires of the prince, to say nothing of the ridiculous and cruel superstitions which find an inviolable shelter under the lilies of France.
"The most austere magistrate may be brought, by his integrity itself, to decrees as revolting, and perhaps even more inhuman, than those of one who fails in his duty, and I do not know myself, which of the two I should dread the most, the judge who has made a soul for himself out of the text of the law, or he who makes use of a remnant of sentiment to twist the text. The one would sacrifice me to his interests or his passions, the other would immolate me coldly for the written word.
"Again, we must notice that the magistrate is the defender, through his office, not of new prejudices to which we are all more or less submissive, but of old prejudices which are preserved in our laws while they are fading from our minds and our manners. And there is no one of a thinking and liberal turn of mind who does not feel how much of the barbarous there is in law, whereas the judge has not the right to feel this.