"Monsieur le curé," I said, "you ought to be careful. There are snakes among those stones. You must have been warned before?"
"Yes, I know," he answered in a muffled voice. "This place is infested with vipers—most pernicious beasts, Monsieur. I hope that on your side you will be able to guard against them."
XIII
MASTER BAPTIST, JUDGE
What kind of justice did Saint Louis dispense under his oak tree? History does not tell us that he was a doctor of law. Everything leads us to suppose that he owed extremely little if anything at all to Papinian, Ulpian, or Tribonian. He was, of course, a Saint, and those among us chosen by Providence to make Its Supreme Will known receive appropriate inspiration from on high. King Solomon, like other Asiatic kings, who are by their people regarded as mouthpieces of divine wisdom, consulted no text when he spoke the famous judgment upon which his glory still rests.
Jews or Christians, the ancient leaders of the people judged in equity, and without too great difficulty arrived at an approximate justice, superior to the "judgments of God," which had too often what looked like the iniquitous unfairness of chance. Codes, by their inflexible rules applied to every case, have overthrown the ancient order, under which an arbitrary procedure fitted the law to each individual transgression. Laws and judges have since become more flexible, they would otherwise be intolerable, but they are still too rigid to bend felicitously to the modifications by which natural right might be promoted. In addition to which, gratuitous "justice" not infrequently ruins the person seeking it.
For all these reasons—fear of the law, which pounces upon poor people they know not whence, fear of the hardened judge who refers the case to his learning rather than to his conscience—our peasants in Western France with difficulty make up their minds to set in motion the so-called "protective" machinery of the law. Even the settlement of a dispute before a justice of the peace seems an extreme measure, and they have recourse to it only under great stress, which is a matter for rejoicing, for such is the "social order," that without this fortunate tendency, mankind, being entirely composed of people who complain, or have reason to complain, law courts would need to be made big enough to accommodate the entire human race.
In the country, sources of disagreement abound. The limb of a tree stretching beyond a fixed boundary, a vagrant root, a fruit dropping on the wrong side of a hedge, the use of a stream, a right of way, may bring up interpretations of customs giving to conflicting interests occasion for dispute. Before coming to the last expedient of going to law, quarrels, insults, and blows perform their office of preparing the way for reconciliation, which eventually results from nervous or muscular exhaustion. A good hand-to-hand fight would constitute a "judgment of God" not without its merits, but for the temptation to "appeal" by nocturnal reprisals on innocent crops.
All that might take one very far. Which is the reason why we often find in country districts certain natural-born arbiters, who bear the same relation to judges that sorcerers do to doctors. The judge is the Hippocrates of social maladies, even as the physician is the judge of physiological disorders. The power to judge and the power to heal are acquired by some mysterious method concerning which rustic clients and patients have very misty notions. Judge and physician often make mistakes, and these create in men's minds a dismay greater than the comfort induced by their most authentic successes.