yapanese ynstice.
545
They made no note of Phillips Brooks, Of Harlan or of Gray, The giant of religious brooks And biggest of JJ. Giant Despair and Jack's big foe, And him whom David smote, — The first were ne'er in any show, The last was too remote. This case would naturally seem unique; But then another judge, by any flight, Could not imagine such a curious freak As man of nineteen feet seven inches' height.1 But on the other hand a court has thought it wrong To say a woman's foot is not eight inches long.2
JAPANESE JUSTICE. ON my way to Aoyama, on the morning of the Imperial birthday, I naturally met many native friends, and among them one — the junior judge of the Tokyo Court — the rencontre with whom suggests a few re marks about Japanese justice and Japanese courts of law. Of late, in connection with the burning question of treaty revision, and the deep disinclination which some foreigners evince to come under Japanese jurisdiction even as the price of the complete and friendly
opening of the Empire, I have been studying a little the methods and character of the Nippon criminal code. Thus I was recently in the court of the judge as a spectator, and, being politely invited to sit on the bench, watched with much advantage for a whole morning the procedure. It was a Criminal Court of First Instance, and the judge had on one side of him a secretary, on the other a registrar, all alike dressed in European frock-coats and side-spring boots. The
1 " It only remains for me to say that we are entirely satisfied by the evidence before us that the open iron bridge, of which the plaintiffs complain in their bill, will not, in any material respect, impair the plaintiffs' use of the alley, and never can do so until some one whose stature shall exceed nineteen feet and seven inches shall have occasion to enter the alley on the plaintiffs' business." Thayer, C. J., Common Pleas of Pennsylvania, in Patterson v. Philadelphia, etc. R. Co. 1 Tallman v. Met. El. R. Co. 121 N. Y. 119. In Gurley v. Pacific Ry. Co., Missouri Supreme Court, April 13, 1891, the Court observed : " How a man of ordinary stature, walking between two ordinary freight cars, could have the fleshy portion of his leg from his thigh down, eight or nine inches, mashed by the bump ers or draw-heads, is beyond our comprehension. We regard this statement, as appears by the record, so contradictory to general knowledge that no court is bound to accept it." Citing the principal case: " To have received the wound the plaintiff did, in simply walking between the cars, if the cars were the ordinary freight-cars, plaintiff must have been of remarkable stature. It may be, on another trial, some intelligent explanation may be given how this wound could have been made; there is certainly none in this."
