Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/129

 cisions were inspired merely by an intuitive sense of right and wrong. Recent research shows that though Japan's eighth-century codes did not remain operative in the feudal age, she had in the mean while come into possession of a body of rules, statutes, and precedents which, though varying more or less in different fiefs, were applied with tolerable uniformity by the deputies and the magistrates throughout the Shōgun's dominions. Nevertheless, that the deputies and magistrates paid almost as much attention to the personal elements of a case as did the "groups" or "headmen," may easily be inferred from the consideration that had the quality of justice obtainable by recourse to an official court differed palpably from that administered by the popular tribunals of arbitration, the latter must have lost their credit, and therefore their usefulness as instruments for checking litigation. Besides, although a deputy might in time be promoted to be a magistrate, and a provincial magistrate might be translated to the capital, these were rare incidents, the general rule being that both classes of officials served throughout their lives in the same localities, and thus, acquiring an intimate acquaintance with the inhabitants, were constrained to look beyond the purely legal aspects of cases brought before them. The result of all this was that the Japanese people learned to pay little attention to abstract theories, and to set much store by considerations which an Anglo-Saxon