Page:Law and Authority (1886).djvu/16

14 law dating from the tenth century are merely agreements regulating service, statute-labor, and tribute due from serfs [sic] and vassals to their lord. The legislators of that period were a handful of brigands, organised for the plunder of a people daily becoming more peaceful, as they applied themselves to agricultural pursuits. These robbers exploited the feeling for justice inherent in the people—they posed as the administrators of that justice, made a source of revenue for themselves out of its fundamental principles, and concocted laws to maintain their own domination.

Later on, these laws, collected and classified by jurists, formed the foundation of our modern codes. And are we to talk about respecting these codes, the legacy of baron and priest?

The first revolution, the revolt of the townships, was successful in abolishing a portion only of these laws; the charters of enfranchised towns are, for the most part, a mere compromise between baronial or episcopal legislation, and the new relations created within the free borough itself. Yet what a difference between these laws and the laws we have now! The town did not take upon itself to imprison and execute citizens for reasons of State; it was content to expel anyone who plotted with the enemies of the city, and to raze his house to the ground. It confined itself to imposing fines for so-called “crimes and misdemeanours;” and in the townships of the twelfth century may even be discerned the just principle, today forgotten, which holds the whole community responsible for the misdoing of each of its members. The societies of that time looked upon crime as an accident or a misfortune; a conception common amongst the Russian peasantry at this moment. Therefore, they did not admit the principle of personal vengeance, as preached by the Bible, but considered that the blame for each misdeed reverted to the whole society. It needed all the influence of the Byzantine Church, which imported into the West the refined cruelties of Eastern despotism, to introduce into the manners of Gauls and Germans the penalty of death, and the horrible tortures afterwards inflicted on those regarded as criminals. Just in the same way, it needed all the influence of the Roman code, the product of the corruption of Imperial Rome, to introduce the notions as to