Page:Petr Kropotkin - Organised Vengeance Called 'Justice', Henry Glasse - The Superstition of Government (1902).djvu/6

6 are the different degrees of jurisdiction.—Bailies, chosen by the members of the guild, the street, the parish or the town, decide the compensation to be granted to the wronged party. In specially important cases, the guild, the street, the parish or the town, convoked to a general meeting, pronounce the sentence. Besides, Arbitration in ail the stages between individuals, between guilds, between parishes and cities takes a very large extension.

But that organisation lasts only a few centuries. Christianity and a revival of the study of Roman law find their way into the ideas of the people at large. The priest harps incessantly upon the anger and wrath of God. His favorite argument—still the same in our day—is that eternal punishment will be inflicted for trespass against the law of the Church; applying the words of the Scripture concerning those possessed by evil spirits, the Church discerns a demon in every wrong-doer; she invents all sorts of tortures to drive the demon from the body, and then burns him that he may not relapse. From the very beginning, Priest and Lord act together; the priest is often himself a Lord; the Pope is a King; therefore the one who has broken the law of civil society is by and by treated as the one who has trespassed against the Church. The clerical and the civil powers go hand in hand, the clerical only slightly ahead, their laws and refined tortures increasing steadily in ferocity. The Pope, himself supreme umpire, gathers round himself lawyers, experts in Roman and feudal laws. Common sense, knowledge of usage and customs, study of human nature, are left more and more in the background; they are said to foster bad passions, to be an invention of the devil. "Precedent" ranks as law, and, the older a judgment is, the more important, the more respectable it appears to be. "Precedents" are therefore sought for from imperial Rome and from Hebrew judges.

Arbitration disappears slowly before the rising power of the bishop, the lord, the king, the pope. As the alliance of civil and religious powers becomes closer, amicable settlements of disputes are forbidden; compensation to the wronged party becomes a thing of the past;—vengeance in the name of a Christian God or of the Roman State being the main point. At the same time, the atrocious character of the penalties inflicted is such that it is almost impossible to read the description of the judicial scenes of that period.