Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/684

 CIRCUIT RIDING IN THE PHILIPPINES

CIRCUIT

RIDING

IN

THE

645

PHILIPPINES

By James H. Blount "I have written these tales of our life "For a sheltered people's mirth, "In jesting guise — but ye are wise "And ye know what the jest is worth." FOR a visiting attorney to spend a morn ing within the cool, secluded, and stately precincts of the Bar Association building of New York City, with the great dead, whose work is already done, looking down at you benignly from the walls, and the strenuous living, whose work is not yet done, sprinkled about the great hall, poring raptly over the guesses of their prede cessors at the true law, is indeed an affir mative pleasure, and a privilege. Especially is this .the case when your visitor, fleeing the heat of his native heath in the far South for a midsummer's holiday with New Eng land friends, stops over in New York, en route, and, wandering from his near by club, into this scholarly environment, the home of the legal profession of the great metropolis, finds that time and place concur to prompt the immediate fulfillment of an oft deferred task, viz., the writing of an article, long since promised to the editor of the Green Bag, on circuit riding in the Philippines in the pioneer days. What is here and now set down is largely a reproduction of things heretofore told verbally to our genial friend just referred to, and concerns problems of transportation, not of law, questions of how to get from one place of holding court to another, rather than of what happened after you got there. The Act of the United States Philippine Commission of 1901, creating the present judicial system, commonly called the Judi ciary Act, divided the Archipelago into fourteen judicial districts (exclusive of the City of Manila, which constituted a district itself, or at least a juridical unit). These districts, numbered respectively from one

to fourteen, beginning with the northern most, contained usually three or four pro vinces, — Americans would call them coun ties — and at the capital of each province, the county seat, court was required by the law aforesaid to be held twice a year. At the time of the passage of this Act there were many of the provinces grouped by it into judicial districts which the lawmaking body had never seen. They had worked like beavers ever since their arrival at Manila in June, 1900, and had gotten around personally to a number of the pro vinces, but many of them, especially the remoter ones, they had not as yet been able to visit. Consequently, some of the judicial districts were simply marked off on a map with a pencil, without any knowledge of how the land lay, or of what available means of communication existed between the capitals of the several provinces com posing it. For example, the district to which I was assigned, when the Civil Gov ernment was founded on July 4, 1901, was the First Judicial District. It was the northernmost district of the Archipelago,. the nearest of all to Hong Kong and the mainland of Asia. Of its four provinces, the two most northerly, Ilocos Norte, on the China Sea side, and Cagayan, on the Pacific Ocean side, looked adjacent enough on the map. Court was only required to be held at the provincial capitals, and the capital of Ilocos Norte was but about eighty miles (on the map, measured by the scale) from the capital of Cagayan. But, as a matter of fact, there was a precipitous and almost pathless range of mountains between the two provinces, infested in the rainy sea-