Justice is administered under laws the issue of the sovereign will, and liable to be repealed at his pleasure. _Trial by jury_ is of recent introduction, and may be considered as an experiment. In the court-room I inquired of an intelligent gentleman how it was working. He said, quite well; and then related the following incident to show how the royal will comes in, even to the smallest affairs of private citizens: An officer under the government promised to give a certain _place_ of profit to a man, who was soon surprised to find that it was given to another. Such mishaps are not unusual in milder governments, I believe. But the disappointed office-seeker sought the man who had promised it to him, and slapped his face in open court, charging him with a breach of faith. He was arraigned and tried by jury for the assault and battery, and the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty, or more accurately,—“Served him right.” The verdict was received with great applause. The Emperor gave the office-seeker and the office-holder also, the striker and the struck, appointments in distant parts of the empire, where neither of them wanted to go or to stay, and thus he punished them both: one for breaking his word, and the other for breaking the peace. There is a vein of humor in such administration of justice.
“The bookkeeper of a mercantile house in Thorn was arrested in the Russian town of Rieszawa, by the burgomaster of that place, on a perfectly unfounded charge of an intention to smuggle. Although the bookkeeper succeeded in establishing his respectability, he was thrown into a dirty prison cell, and kept there twenty-four hours. His principal, of course, complained of this most unjustifiable treatment, and has lately received an official communication that the burgomaster has also been imprisoned twenty-four hours, and in the same prison in which he had shut up the unhappy bookkeeper.”
M. Andreoli, a Russian writer, who was exiled some years ago to Siberia, is now contributing to the _Revue Moderne_, under the title of “Souvenirs de Sibérie,” his recollections not only of Siberian but also of Russian life. In the last number of the _Revue_ he tells a story, the end of which belongs to the present reign, the beginning to the reign of Paul, of whose period it is strikingly characteristic. The Emperor’s favorite was at that time a young French actress, of whom he was madly jealous. One evening, at a ball, he noticed that a young man named Labanoff was paying her a great deal of attention. He did not lose his temper, but at the end of the ball gave orders that Labanoff should be arrested and thrown into the citadel. He only intended to keep him there a few days, “to make him more serious,” after which he proposed to reprimand him and to appoint him to an office which had been solicited for him. Labanoff, however, was forgotten. At the death of Nicholas, Alexander II., then full of magnanimity, liberated all the prisoners in the citadel, without exception. In a vaulted tomb, in which it was impossible to stand upright, and which was not more than two yards long, an old man was found, almost bent double, and incapable of answering when he was spoken to. This was Labanoff. The Emperor Paul had been succeeded by the Emperor Alexander I., and afterwards by the Emperor Nicholas; he had been in the dungeon more than fifty years. When he was taken out he could not bear the light, and, by a strange phenomenon, his movements had become automatic. He could hardly hold himself up, and he had become so accustomed to move about within the limits of his narrow cell that he could not take more than two steps forwards without turning round, as though he had struck against a wall, and taking two steps backwards, and so on alternately. He lived for only a week after his liberation.