Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/66

Rh charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages."

The world has accepted Bacon's own judgment of himself,—

"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure of Parliament that was these two hundred years."

Francis Bacon was a man of his time, and it was a time of gift-giving and gift-taking. He was ostentatious and lived always beyond his means. He kept a large retinue of servants and was too busy and too careless of detail to look to them closely. All this made him an easy prey to facility, which he describes as the fourth vice of authority,—"As for facility, it is worse than bribery; for bribes come but now and then; but if importunity or idle respects lead a man, he shall never be without." Of Great Place. During the four years of Bacon's Chancellorship he made some two thousand orders and decrees a year. Not one of these judgments was reversed, even in the twenty-three cases where bribery was charged. No case of proved injustice was brought forward in all that heat of prosecution, nor has historical research discovered any such case since. Bacon did not sell injustice. But the selling of justice, even through carelessness or time-serving, is intolerable. There is no freedom, except under the supremacy of law. The reign of law cannot be maintained by corrupt judges. By his own confession, Lord Chancellor Bacon was a corrupt judge. "The pity of it." Rh