I find it difficult to believe that
capital, with its specialized views of what constitutes its advantages,
its duties, and its responsibilities, and stimulated by a bar moulded to
meet its prejudices and requirements, will ever voluntarily assent to
the consolidation of the United States to the point at which the
interference of the courts with legislation might be eliminated;
because, as I have pointed out, capital finds the judicial veto useful
as a means of at least temporarily evading the law, while the bar, taken
as a whole, quite honestly believes that the universe will obey the
judicial decree. No delusion could be profounder and none, perhaps, more
dangerous. Courts, I need hardly say, cannot control nature, though by
trying to do so they may, like the Parliament of Paris, create a
friction which shall induce an appalling catastrophe.
True judicial courts, whether in times of peace or of revolution, seldom
fail to be a substantial protection to the weak, because they enforce an
established _corpus juris_ and conduct trials by recognized forms. It is
startling to compare the percentage of convictions to prosecutions, for
the same class of offences, in the regular criminal courts during the
French Revolution, with the percentage in the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Pages:
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224