Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/94

 where, Japanese statesmen could feel assured that codes borrowed from France would not present any startling novelties or disturb any time-honoured precedents. They chose to be indebted to France because she was distinguished by the possession of codes that had stood the test of practice, and they went to England for prison models because object lessons were easily accessible in her adjacent colonies; but no profound significance should be attached to these selections. The work of the code-compilers necessarily took time. It was not completed, indeed, until 1880, and the new codes—criminal and criminal procedure—went into force in 1881. The Japanese Government, however, had not been content to stumble along with the old system while awaiting the new. Coming into office at the close of 1867, it immediately appointed commissioners who, without recourse to foreign aid, were able to publish in 1871 a body of laws applicable to the whole empire, and to supplement them, two years later, by a code showing many conspicuous improvements. These enactments served as stepping-stones to the Franco-Japanese codes of 1881, and truly it is difficult to determine which of the two constituted the more radical departure from the spirit of original Japanese jurisprudence. The Japanese commissioners, working alone, recognised as fully as did their French successors that the certainty of punishment, not its severity, is the true principle of penal legislation, and that the object of laws is to