was known as having already made up his mind about it, and as having had certain confabulations with the witness Picquart. In the next place there was M. Manau, the Public Prosecutor, whose speech was a veritable pleading in the condemned man's favour. Both these speeches contained errors, misquotations, and falsehoods. Moreover, numerous witnesses proved that their interrogatories had been conducted with the evident intention of preventing the truth from coming out. Thus a dilemma presented itself. It was necessary either to prosecute M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire for slander before the Assize Court, where he would have the right to produce his proofs, or to adopt the view of the committee of inquiry, which was that the task of deciding whether or not the Dreyfus trial shall be revised should be entrusted to the whole Court of Cassation, all three Chambers united.

Laid with great vigour before the Chamber of Deputies, the question assumed a political character, but of quite a different colour from that which M. Brisson tried to give it. By a majority of 125 the Chamber has coincided with the committee of inquiry and the Government. It has thus dispossessed the Criminal Chamber of the absolute right of judging alone. The clause voted is only the complement of a law already in existence, and therefore is not an exceptional measure passed to meet special circumstances.

This is how the matter stands at present. It is not done with yet, but if the head of the Cabinet, M. Dupuy, so wishes, it will soon be disposed of. He has made himself very popular by his vigorous action since he became convinced of the faults of the Criminal Chamber.

One thing has been brought into relief by these unhappy discussions, and especially by the publication of the documents touching the investigations-namely, the state of abasement into which judicial morals in France have fallen. This result was plainly foreseen in 1883, when Government and Parliament resolved to do away with the irremovable character of the judge's position, in order to make room on the bench for men of little capacity and mediocre morality.

We have shown that the judicial staff is a very numerous one, even if we leave out the three thousand justices of the peace and a still larger body of deputy-justices. Counting the subaltern

employees, it forms a veritable army corps that holds the country at its discretion. It even numbers, in its secondary ranks, officers who can at their pleasure imprison people and bring them by dark and devious ways to ruin and dishonour.

A juge d'instruction belonging to the Tribunal of the Seine, a good, learned, and circumspect man, was once questioned by the Emperor Napoleon the Third about his duties. With a good humour not wholly free from irony the judge replied: 'Sire, I am more

powerful than your Majesty.' 'How so?' 'You cannot, directly and of your own will, throw a man into prison; I can do that.' The magistrate then explained how, on the slightest pretext, or acting upon the most trivial denunciation, an inquiring judge, once put in charge of a case by the Public Prosecutor, could have an innocent person-an entire stranger to the affair-arrested and kept in solitary confinement, if he thought the person had been concerned in it. A personal enemy could be locked up, which of course would be a disgraceful proceeding, or simply a suspected man, which would be the result of excessive zeal. The Emperor's face assumed an anxious expression, and certainly, if war had not broken out soon afterwards, he would have asked his Minister of Justice, M. Emile Ollivier, to place a limit to these extravagant powers and make some special rules as to the choice of the magistrates entrusted with such dangerous though honourable duties.

No change has yet been made in this respect, except that now the examination must be made in the presence of the accused's counsel. Do not suppose, however, that this safeguard, copied from English legislation, has come into favour in France. True, we are not likely to see a repetition of the case of the woman, accused of infanticide, who was brought, by a too skilful examination, to confess a crime she had not committed, as was proved by her giving birth a few days later to the child she had been charged with destroying; but the Panama case, the history of which is related with so much vivacity and humour by M. Henri Maret, Deputy, in his book entitled La Justice, and the more recent affair of the placing in solitary confinement of Major Esterhazy, are not of such a nature as to denote a great step forward in judicial methods. A deputy belonging to the Right, M. de Ramel, has recently drawn attention to the matter by bringing in a bill which, if passed, will make the liberty of the individual more of a reality, and render men's homes more secure from invasion than they are now.

There is room for several other improvements in the system of dispensing justice in France. Complaint is made that legal proceedings are too slow and too costly. It is written in our laws that justice is rendered without expense to the litigants, but this is utterly false. On the contrary, it is very expensive. If we seek the reason of this, we find that the State makes it a source of revenue in various ways-stamps, registration fees, &c. The sinuosities of legal procedure are peopled with officials who stop you on your way and make you pay dearly for the honour of their signatures. At every step in the formalities, civil or criminal, there is a tax to pay. You have no right to receive payment from a debtor for what he owes you until you have settled, for him and in his stead, the costs in which he has been mulcted. The treasury is obliged to get back somehow or other the money it pays out in judges' salaries! There

are over three thousand senior officers and more than ten thousand subalterns, corporals and privates, in this army of functionaries who look to the State for their pay. The Court of Cassation does not cost less than 1,147,000 francs per annum, plus 32,300 francs of petty expenses. This is the price at which it renders its decrees, or its services, when required. The courts of appeal cannot live on less than 6,515,033 francs a year. The tribunals of first instance need more 11,534,000 francs; or, if we add the salary of the judge of Andorra and certain expenses of the tribunals of commerce and the police courts, 97,700 francs more. As to the justices of the peace, they are very valuable, but costly, their price being 8,413,000 francs for France, and 697,650 francs for Algeria. The criminal courts are satisfied with 5,850,000 francs for the two countries. We say nothing about the cost of maintenance of the court buildings.

Justice is administered in France and Algeria at a total expense of not less than 25,000,000 francs per annum. If we did not know what a large number of judges are paid out of this sum, we might suppose it to be a most profitable career. This is not the fact. French judges are badly off when they have not a private fortune. Their salaries are worse than mediocre. In this connection there recurs to our mind a remark which was made by one of our friends in England. It was in the time of the Empire, but the salaries have not been increased very much since then, save in a few cases. Said our friend: You want to be served like princes, and you pay your employees like lackeys.' We will not say that France treats her judges like lackeys, but assuredly she does not pay them as they ought to be paid. A judge is a man above almost all others. He must be of unimpeachable integrity, learned, even erudite, in the law, conscientious to an extreme, well-bred, impartial, endowed with perspicacity, good sense, and uprightness, unshakably loyal to the truth, inaccessible to popularity, and beyond the reach of Governmental influences. Such a man ought not to be subjected to the anxieties of making both ends meet, nor left in uncertainty as to what the future may have in store for him and his family. By an Act passed in 1814 judges were made irremovable, and were, if not well paid, at all events sure of holding their posts. There was also the dignity of the position, as in those days it was not easy for the first comer to get elevated to the bench. Every man chosen did not fulfil the ideal we have sketched, but for a very long time the judicial body retained a high character. The upheavals that came later on shook the institution no doubt, but the revolutionists were careful not to throw it down. More recently it received a deadly blow. Things were done which gave rise to the fear that Justice would have to veil her face. This apprehension was temporary, but sprang up again the day when a blind Ministry and Parliament, in order to facilitate the task of governing, did away with the

permanent character of the judge's position. This step diminished his moral weight, and from that moment he found himself beginning to be looked upon by the nation with distrust, and felt that he was descending in the public's esteem. It seemed to many people that the new magistracy was going to serve political interests and sacrifice honour to Governmental influences, but, although the judges no longer had the renown of former days, the new ones zealously strove to imitate the virtues of the old.

This is not enough. The great reform which will come to pass some day is not, perhaps, compatible with universal suffrage as it exists at present; but it is to be hoped that in the future our judges will be placed so far beyond the reach of improper influences that they cannot fall. Instead of the ill-paid thousands we have now, a few hundred would suffice. The idea of having single judges in the courts is gaining ground. It is seen to be a means of eliminating a number of mediocrities, of letting in only men of great talent, and of making the judge strong enough and independent enough to soar above the level of the agitated community and hold the balance evenly between small and great, weak and strong, iniquity and right. Liberal salaries could be paid-not, however, such splendid ones as those received by the judges of the United Kingdom-and yet a substantial saving be effected by the State, while the cause of justice would be infinitely better served.

ALPHONSE DE CALONNE.

THE NORDRACH CURE PRACTICABLE IN

THIS COUNTRY

I SHOULD like to deal, in the first place, with the article by Dr. J. G. Sinclair Coghill in this Review for last month, and more especially with those parts of it in which he criticises my paper which appeared in the January number.

I am surprised at the tone which Dr. Coghill, at places, assumes, for, generally speaking, he but confirms everything I said. So far as his paper deals with preventive measures and suggestions it is worthy of every consideration; but, if I may be permitted to say so, where it deals with the treatment of consumption it is not all that could be desired.

Dr. Coghill says that it is not claimed that in all cases fresh air and proper feeding alone suffice for treatment. They certainly do not suffice for treatment, because there is also that strict supervision of every case which is quite as important. He does not take note of this matter of supervision, but says that the usual drugs must be used to relieve the symptoms- fever, nightsweats, cough, hæmorrhage, dyspepsia, &c.-overlooking the fact that these things are only symptoms of the disease, and that the proper mode of treatment is not to tinker with the symptoms but to treat the disease itself. It has been proved by Walther at Nordrach that the best means of reducing fever of any degree and night-sweats are absolute rest in bed, alone and undisturbed even by talking, and proper feeding. (Excessive cough will yield to the same treatment. Hæmorrhage is an accident, and is to be treated as such. Dyspepsia will disappear as nutrition advances.)

This proper feeding is not harmful to patients even with extremest fever, though Dr. Coghill thinks it is. I know of the case of a lady who, at Nordrach, suffered from pyrexial phthisis in the extreme. Her temperature used to be about 96.8° F. in the morning, after a rigor 105.8° F. at noon, 96.8° F. again in the afternoon, and, after a second rigor, again about 105.8° F. in the evening. She received every bit of food from the doctor's own hands, lay in bed with fever for nine months, and then got up again with a gain of forty-six

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