Courts of justice were to be open in every province, and all these courts of justice were to be public courts. Trained judges were to preside. The system of written evidence was abolished. A prisoner was to be charged in a formal act; he was to see the witnesses face to face; he was to have the right, in person or by his counsel, of questioning those witnesses on points of fact. A jury was to decide the question of guilt or innocence. The judges were to be paid by the crown, and were on no pretext whatever to receive a fee. A juror was to be a man of means--a trader, a well-off peasant, an officer of not less than five hundred rubles a year. A majority of jurors was to decide. The Imperial code was brought into harmony with these new methods of procedure. Capital punishment was abolished for civil crimes; Siberia was exchanged for the club and the axe; Archangel and the Caucasus were substituted for the mines. The Tartar punishments of beating, flogging, running the ranks, were stopped at once, and every branch of criminal treatment was brought up--in theory, at least--to the level of England and the United States. Term by term this new system of trial by judge and jury, instead of by secret commissions, is now being introduced into all the larger towns. I have watched the working of this new system in several provinces; but give an account, by preference, of a trial in a new court, in a new district, under circumstances which put the virtues of a jury to some local strain. Dining one evening with a friend in Rostof, on the Lower Don, I find myself seated next to President Gravy, to whom I am introduced by our common host as an English barrister and justice of the peace. The Assize is sitting, and as a curious case of child-exposure is coming on next day, about the facts of which provincial feeling is much excited, President Gravy offers me a seat in his court. This court is a new court, opened in the present year; a movable court, consisting of a president and two assistant judges; sitting in turn at Taganrog, Berdiansk, and Rostof, towns between which there is a good deal of rivalry in business, often degenerating into local strife. The female accused of exposing her infant comes from a Tartar village near Taganrog; and as no good thing was ever known to come from the district of Taganrog, the voice of Rostof has condemned this female, still untried, to a felon's doom.