“The bush with its soft green twilight, dark shadows, and quivering lights, is peopled by many terrors, but among these ‘Ojje’, or witchcraft, reigns supreme. The bird which flies in at your open door in the sunlight, the bat which circles round you at night, the small bushbeasts which cross your path while hunting, all may be familiars of witch or wizard or even the latter themselves, disguised to do you hurt. Sometimes the terror of witchcraft will scatter a whole town.” And for belief in witchcraft, among the southern darkies, see Journal of American Folk Lore, vol. III., p. 205; Bruce’s “Plantation Negro as a Freeman”; and Jones’ “Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast.” [52] II. Mackay’s “Memoirs of Delusions,” p. 277. CHAPTER III. RECALL OF JUDGES. “Of all the virtues, Justice is the best, Valour without it is a common pest. ... All other virtues dwell but in the blood, That in the soul, and gives the name of good; Justice, the queen of virtues.”—Waller. Judge is the generic descriptive name given to one who is invested with the power of judging and deciding causes in the courts of law. The recall, as applied to the judiciary, is the withdrawal of the power given a judge to decide causes. As justice has always been the great interest of man, on earth, we find that the virtue has ever been extolled, as one of the greatest blessings of the human race and among the earliest institutions of which we have any knowledge, we find that courts were constituted, for the distribution or enforcement of justice, through the medium of judges.[1] The great law-giver, Moses, having learned the hard lesson from the book of human life, early grasped the truth that man’s nature needed protection from its own impulses and passions, and that an exalted rule of conduct, commanding what was right, to be effective, must be enforced and interpreted, by a wholly disinterested guiding influence. He accordingly established the administration of justice, among the ancient Israelites, by choosing “able men, out of Israel, such as feared God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and made them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens; and they judged the people at all seasons; the hard causes they brought unto Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves.”[2] Grasping, even at this early day at the exalted standard, later realized, in the Horatian ideal, “of the just man, who, firm in the consciousness of right, disdains, with equanimity, the frowns of a tyrant and the clamors of a mob,” we find this old patriarch, fifteen centuries before Christ, admonishing the judges of the Israelites: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause, to decline, after many, to wrest judgment.”[3] Admonishing the judges, further, in regard to being swayed in their decisions, by the fickle winds of public sentiment, Moses said: