Justice is administered under laws the issue of the sovereign will, and liable to be repealed at his pleasure.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.”