532
The Green Bag
ber of judges in France is very large, even if the three thousand justices of the peace and a still larger body of deputy-justices are omitted. Counting the subaltern employees, it forms a veritable army corps that hold the country at its discretion. It even numbers, in its secondary ranks, officers who can at their will imprison people and bring them by devious ways to ruin and dishonor. It is possible for an enquiring judge, once put in charge of a case by the public prosecutor, to have an innocent person —-an entire stranger to the affair — arrested and kept in solitary confinement, if he believed — or even wished to believe — that the person had been con cerned in it. A personal enemy, or simply a suspected man, can be arrested and locked up. In some cases, when this occurs, it is simply the result of excessive zeal upon the part of an official. It is true, however, that the examination of an accused person must be made in the presence of the counsel for the accused — if he has one. But this supposed safeguard, copied from England, is more ap parent than real, because the counsel is usually obliged to sit still and keep his mouth closed. There is room for many improvements in the judicial system of Franee. Complaint is made, as it is in other countries, that legal proceed ings are too slow and too costly. It is writ ten in the law of France that justice is done without expense to the litigants, but this is entirely false. On the contrary, it is very expensive. If we search for the reason of this, we find that the State makes it a source of revenue in various ways — stamps, regis tration fees, etc. There are officials who expect to be paid for the honor of their sig natures. At every step in the formalities, civil or criminal, there is a tax to pay. You have no right to receive payment from a debtor for what he owes you until you have settled, for him, the costs in which he has been mulcted. The treasury is obliged to recover I
by some process the money it pays out for judges' salaries! There are more than three thousand senior officers and more than ten thousand subalterns, corporals and privates, in this army of functionaries who look to the State for their pay. The Court of Cassation does not cost less than $285,000 each year. The Courts of Appeal cost about $1,500,000 per annum. The tribunals of first instance require $23,000,000 each year. The crimi nal courts require $1,500,000 every year. None of these figures includes the mainten ance of court buildings. Making a total, jus tice is administered in France and Algeria at a cost of not less than six million dollars (twenty-four million francs) per annum. If one did not know what a large number of judges are paid out of the amount, one might suppose that a judge was highly paid. This is not the case. When a French judge has no private means, he is in anything but a good position financially. The salaries of judges in France are small. They are certainly not paid as they ought to be. But this remark is equally applicable to the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States. All over the world a judge is supposed to be a man of unimpeachable integrity, learned, even erudite, in the law, conscientious to an extreme degree, impartial, endowed with exceptional perspicacity, loyal to the truth, in accessible to popular clamor, and beyond the reach of political influences. Such a man ought not to be subjected to the anxieties of making both ends meet, nor left in uncer tainty as to what the future may have in store for him and his family. By an Act passed in 18 14, judges were made irremov able, and they are therefore sure of holding their positions. There was also the dignity of the position, as in those days it was not easy for any man who coveted a position to get elevated to the bench. Every man chosen did not fulfil the ideal I have tried to sketch,
