with the duty of interrogating the pri soner, and, to fulfil this task, he makes himself perfectly acquainted with all the facts, and comes to the trial fully prepared to draw them out. These peculiar attributes of the French judges are of inestimable importance in the prosecution of criminal affairs, and they are performed with great labor and study. The following is the number of the judicial officers of France, which I have taken the trouble to extract from the " Almanach Royal et National" for 1840, the Blue Book of the kingdom, and also from the budget of the "Garde des Scéaur" submitted to the Chambers: cision. Appeals exist in civil and criminal cases. In the former, the parties are allowed three months to take their appeal, and in the latter, three days. Every person sentenced to a capital or infamous punishment has the right to carry his case before the Court of Cassation. These cases are promptly determined, so that there is little delay, and that little is far more than overbalanced by the secu rity to the most precious rights which the existence of this process ensures to the community and the party. I have often wondered, that we, who are so jealous upon all other subjects of personal liberty, and who have provided such ample means for the re-examination, by a supreme tribunal, of questions-indeed almost the smallest questions-affecting the value of property, should have left persons accused of crimes without any resource against Justices of the Peace, the errors of judges, engaged in the pressing business of a session, and liable, from the very circumstances of their position, to decide hastily and, of course, erroneously. I say without resource, because the provisions which exist upon this subject, where they exist at all, are so hedged round with difficulties, as greatly to diminish if not to destroy their value. In the Cours Royales there is a chamber called the 66 Chambre d'Accusation," whose functions bear some analogy to those of our own grand juries. It examines the charges, and if these are deemed insufficient or insufficiently supported, the accused is released from the prosecution-otherwise, the act of accusation or indictment is drawn up from the statements of the witnesses, and then the cause is referred for trial to the chamber to which it appropriately belongs. The investigations in criminal cases in the French courts are far more searching than in ours. The necessary facts are collected and arranged with great care, and the parquet, as the law. officers of the crown are technically called, places itself in possession of all the incidents which can serve to develop the affair. The antecedents of the accused are carefully sought, and the proof, moral and material, or, as we should say, circumstantial and direct, are brought to bear with great force upon the accusation. The president of the tribunal is always charged Judges of the Court of Cassation, Accounts, 49 102 791 Tribunals of 1st Instance, 1678 46 Judicial officers in France, 909 2745 6274 Salaries in France are generally low. In a comparatively few exceptional cases, where the nature of the station, either at home or abroad, leads to inevlarge. But otherwise they are quite itable expense, the allowances are moderate, when the wealth and habits of the country are taken into view. I extract from the budget of the "Garde des Scéaux," or Minister of Justice, the following exhibit of the salaries of judicial officers. I put the sums in francs, but I add also the amount in dollars, not precisely, but with sufficient exactness for all useful purposes of comparison: COURT OF CASSATION. The First President has Each other Judge, COURT OF ACCOUNTS. First President, Three other Presidents, each Sixty-two other Judges, each COURS ROYALES. 27 First Presidents, average each Francs. Dolls. 30,000 6,000 18,000 3,600 15,000 3,000 13,500 2,700 93 Presidents de Chambre, average each 4,390 876 3,590 718 of the Presidents and Vice-Presidents receive the same sum, to wit: Judges, 2,250 450 2.000 400 The Judges of the Tribunals of Commerce are generally merchants, who perform their duties gratuitously. JUSTICES OF THE PEACE. At Paris the Justices of the Peace receive At Bordeaux, Lyons, and Marseilles, 2,400 480 240 1,200 I subjoin a few other salaries of civil officers, that a general notion may be formed of the system of remuneration adopted by the French government. The Ministers, or as we should say the Secretaries of the Departments, are provided with houses, and these are heated and lighted at the public expense, and their salaries (with one exception) are 80,000 fr., $16,000. But their expenses are great, as custom imposes upon them the duty of giving expensive dinner parties, and of keeping their houses open one evening in the week, more than half the year. Paying officers in the Departments receive the following salaries : First class, Third Fourth 64 Francs. Dolls. The Directors of the Custom Houses (or in our administrative nomenclature, Collectors,) in twenty-six of the principal cities, average 99 Inspectors, each 99 Sub-Inspectors, each 165 Principal Clerks, each 865 Accountable Receivers, each 93 Comptrollers, 816 Verificators, 711 Clerks, 10,000 2,000 8,000 1,600 6,000 1,200 4,800 960 3,000 600 300 ity do not defray the expenses they are intended to meet,-a colonel receiving but 960 francs ($192), and a captain but 360 francs ($72), per annum for rent; and the former 320 fr. ($64), and the latter 180 fr. ($38), for furniture. I believe the officers in all the cities of France, except the officers of the staff, lodge in hired quarters; rarely, if ever, in the public casernes. They receive no rations, nor any allowance for them except during war. A colonel and lieutenant-colonel are allowed forage for two horses; and all other regimental officers required to be mounted are allowed for one. The horses must be actually kept in the service. No provision exists for servants, nor any compensation for them. In all the above calculations, for the sake of round numbers and facility, the dollar has been assumed as worth five francs. In exact truth it is worth about six cents more, so that all the sums here stated in dollars may be reduced about one-fifteenth lower. I had intended to place in juxtaposition with this scale of compensation, the rate which is paid in England for similar services, but I have not time to make the necessary researches, and must therefore forego my object. The 10,000 2,000 salaries allowed, however, to some of the principal functionaries in the British metropolis are well known to be enormous, and may be referred to not unprofitably, as showing the tendency to profuse expenditure which is the necessary consequence of large revenues and little responsibility. They will be found to contrast significantly with the policy of the French government. When is the day to arrive, when the weary and heavy-laden masses of England, of whose oppressive burthens of footing, footing, of absence. taxation these great aristocratic salaries constitute one of the chief items, will arouse themselves to a full consciousness of their own mighty wrongs, and to that energy of will and determination alone necessary, to cast off those burthens and redress those wrongs? In further illustration of the remark I have made upon the low scale of official salaries in France, I subjoin also the following statement of the rates of pay in the army, the general accuracy of which may be relied on, being derived from official sources: Field Marshal, (Major General) Peace War On leave $6.000 $14,000 3,000 2,000 3,750 $1,520 adopted, modified, or rejected. And in the execution of this duty, the reférendaire, or where there is no reférendaire, the president of the tribunal, is exposed to a custom, formerly universal and yet very prevalent; but which is so irreconcilable with our notions of judicial reserve, that we are involuntarily induced to look with suspicion upon the administration of justice where magistrates are liable to such importunities. The parties are expected to wait upon the judge, and to tender him their compliments, and this visit is called in technical language, "visite de supplique," or visit of supplication. Justice has always been venal in the East, and this plague-spot yet adheres to its ermine wherever the Moslem has planted his institutions. It assumes the softened appearance of a free gift, and vain are the hopes of the Giaour, however just his cause, if the itching palm of the Cadi does not feel this judicial stimulant or corrective. Among the western nations of Europe the bribe became much earlier a present, but both had so far disappeared before the advancing opinions of the age, that in England Bacon furnishes the last example of an eminent judge who dishonored himself and his profession by this practice. In France, however, presents to the magistrates made part of the duty of suitors, and constituted, I am told, the greater portion, if not nearly all the compensation of these officers. These contributions were familiarly called, their épice, their spice, and were universally paid by the suitors down to the revolution of 1789; and a very able French advocate, who was driven to our country by the storms of that period, and who afterwards returned to enjoy a high reputation for learning and probity in his own-M. De La G.-has assured me, that the traditions upon this subject had not altogether lost their force, even a few years since. An instance passed within his own observation, and the judge extricated the maladroit suitor from a serious embarrassment, with equal good sense and good feeling. Without the knowledge of his Avocat, the client had sent to the judge a basket of game, with a note requesting his acceptance of it. The magistrate directed the note and the basket to the Avocat, informing him it had been sent by mistake to the wrong place, and that it was intended by the donor as a mark of satisfaction for the exertions of his lawyer. At present, bribery, whatever form it can assume, is utterly unknown in the French tribunals. The robes of their members are spotless. But the practice of intercession, or rather, of complimenting the judge, still exists. It is a mark of respect which is looked for, and whose omission is considered as violating the established rules of professional etiquette. This want of conventional propriety has, assuredly, no other operation upon the issue of the process, than any other mark of illbreeding, though from the constitution of human nature it may occasionally excite feelings not reconcilable with an impartial decision. The inconve niences of this custom are felt and deplored by many members of the bar and the bench; and at least two of the Cours Royales, those of Orléans and Rouen, have abolished it within their jurisdiction. It yet maintains, however, its sway at Paris and in many other parts of the kingdom; and as the profession is everywhere somewhat tenacious of established usages, it may be difficult to effect its entire suppression. And in proof of this difficulty I am able to refer to a letter from an able and estimable judge of the Court of Cassation, to whom I had applied for information upon this subject. Among other things, he says: "The visits of the parties have no longer the obligatory character they possessed under the parliament. We receive those who think they have any useful information to communicate upon their process. This appears to us free from impropriety. But there are some tribunals who have thought proper to interdict these visits by special regulations. This is an example which we (the Court of Cassation) have neither wished to give nor to follow." But I repeat, that this ancient custom thus modified leaves untouched the purity of the French judicial character; and that it is obnoxious to censure, only as it exposes the judges to unseasonable, and, as we should say, indelicate visits. To show the practical nature of this application, I annex a letter, which was written by an American functionary here to the president of a tribunal, to which one of his countrymen had been compelled to appeal, in a case of signal injustice, involving a question of the laws of nations. The letter was prepared in the usual form by the avocat of the party, and was sent with the official card of the writer. It will be perceived that it is altogether a harmless epistle, and is in fact but a compliment of usage, like the formal termination of a letter, or any other mark of respect, which the forms of society require : genarian Jew, if expiated upon the scaffold, with the usual accompaniments of prolonged torture, which belonged to the code of that day, would have entailed disgrace upon a crowd of his noble relations; and they would have found the entrance to the rich and princely chapters, abbeys, and bishoprics, both of France and Germany, and many commanderies and orders, even that of Malta, closed to them. for the cadets of noble families required, as indispensable preliminaries to their participation, that the applicant should exhibit his proofs for four generations. "Sir," said the Prince de Ligne to the Regent, "I have in my genealogical tree four escutcheons of Horn, and consequently I have four ancestors of that house! I must then erase them; the result will be blanks, and as it were blots in our family." “To M. de B—, President of the All these comfortable places of refuge Tribunal of the First Instance. M. le President, "Certain articles and papers, belonging to M., have been detained at a certain house in Paris, and he has commenced suit before you on the subject. "Permit me to ask of you, that this affair may experience as little delay as possible, and accept the assurances of my high consideration. (Signed) In the memoirs of the Marquise de Créquy, that extraordinary woman, who had the good fortune to be presented to Louis XIV. and to Napoleon, there is an interesting recital of an incident which in its day made much noise in Europe, and where this process of supplication is prominently introduced. It was the trial of the Comte de Horn for an atrocious murder. This man was related to many of the most noble families of Germany and France, and among others to that of the Regent Duke of Orleans. The miserable trash of that day-for it deserves no milder epithet-which prescribed the privileges of the feudal aristocracy, pronounced also what should dishonor it. So far as disgrace was the consequence of crime, and was limited to the criminal himself, the everlasting principles of true justice and policy were faithfully observed. But this was not enough for an age of barbarous pride. The thirty-two quarterings of the escutcheon, in the language of the heralds, must not be soiled. The dishonor of a criminal attached to all his kinsmen within many degrees of propinquity: and to render the prejudice ridiculous as well as unjust, it was not the crime but the punishment, which provoked the disgrace. An assassination like that of which Horn was guilty, instigated not by sudden passion, nor even by vengeance, but by rapacity, upon an octo The lively and garrulous old lady then recounts the supplication of the relatives of Horn, by which they hoped to relax the severity of justice. "It was decided that they should begin by soliciting the magistrates, to whom they stated the high rank, the illness, the disposition, and the unfortunate derangement of the Comte de Horn. On the eve of his trial we went in a body of relations, consisting of fiftyseven persons, into a long corridor of the palace, which led to the room where the trial was to take place, that we might solicit the judges upon their passage. It was a melancholy ceremony, though every one entertained great hopes, except Madame de Beaufremont, who was gifted with second sight, as it is called in Scotland. We both felt painful misgivings, with a dreadful heaviness of heart. I must mention this custom of saluting the judges as a strange ceremony. They had waited in St. Louis' Cabinet, that they might all be assembled to receive salutations, which they returned by making each a low curtesy." Here, with a versatility significative of the deep impression which questions of costume and etiquette had graven upon her mind, Madame de Créquy suddenly forgets the melancholy narrative which had absorbed her attention, and, with equal solemnity and naïveté, quits the professional duties on which depended life and death, to occupy herself with profes sional robes and curtesies. "I must add, that custom has long decided on lawyers saluting thus in their long robes. It is the same with the Chevaliers de St. Esprit, when in their long mantles, which always determined parents of rank in my time to make curtesying a part of the education of their sons, in hopes of their attaining that distinction. Boys were kept in petticoats as long as possible -often until the age of thirteen or fourteen. It subjected them to annoyance and persecution, but, until they were dressed as men, they always saluted by curtesying." Oh! for the dignity of human nature! If it is humiliating it is also instructive, and may be profitable, to survey its absurdities. Not a century has passed away since vile stuff like this was an important study in life, and since its slavish votaries were par excellence the great ones of the earth, and ruled by the divine right of hereditary wisdom. We have follies enough in our day, no doubt, which our successors will be sufficiently acute to discover and ready enough to expose; but I trust, whatever else we do, we shall eschew the contemptible nonsense which, till after the middle of the eighteenth century, made much of the wisdom of some of the European naticns, and was a powerful and proximate cause of the mighty revolution which swallowed up the Sybarite and his traditions. The effort, however, of the relations of De Horn to save his life, and what was called their honor, having failed with the magistrates, they repaired in another family procession to the Regent, to ask, first, that the criminal should not be executed, and second, if this favor could not be obtained, that he should be nobly decapitated, instead of being ignobly racked; and that thus the genealogical tree might flourish unscathed. The Regent, to his immortal honor, refused this application. And this act of vigorous just ice is a redeeming trait in the sad history of that able but dissolute prince, whose public and private life presents so much to condemn. Keeping in view the notions of the ancient régime, one can scarcely conceive a greater proof of magnanimity than he furnished upon this occasion. He was himself a relative of De Horn, through his mother, a German Princess; and the Prince de Ligne, the speaker of the family council, urged this circumstance upon his consideration, and warned him of the heraldic dishonor which awaited him. "I will share the shame with you, gentlemen," answered the Duke of Orleans, and bowed the supplicators out of his cabinet. The institution of the jury has been transplanted into the French law, but it has somewhat of the sickliness of an exotic. It is, however, making its way, and even now there is no fear of its failure. Unanimity is not required in its decisions. A simple majority of one is sufficient for a verdict; but in that case the court has a discretionary power to accept or modify. Over that number, the verdict is absolute. The French judgments are all drawn up by the judges themselves. There is no established form, as in our courts, which, while its observance is essential to the validity of the proceedings, in reality is utterly insignificant as to any practical utility; which teaches nothing and guards nothing, and yet if not followed "in literis," all the preceding investigations, both by the court and jury, founded upon the statements and proofs of the parties, are rejected; and the final decision, instead of turning upon the question of right, turns upon some idle dispute about words or forms, the relics of a monkish age, but still preserved and worshipped with fatuitous reverence. And this is gravely called justice! A brief abstract of the judgment rendered yesterday by the Chamber of Peers, in the prosecutions pending there for treason, referred to in the earlier part of this paper, will exhibit the good sense of the French tribunals upon this subject. And, by-the-bye, I lament to see that the journalist Dupoty has been condemned to imprisonment for five years. I am disposed to speak with all the deference which becomes a foreigner upon the internal questions of a country that he can never fully comprehend; but it appears to me that this act of judicial rigor is almost a folly, and certainly a great error. Many will consider it a great crime. Certainly, agreeably to any general principles recognised among us, this editor could not be convicted of treason, which embraces that class of acts that in France is submitted to the Chamber of Peers under the denomination of complots |