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Surely, every candid person will exclaim, given the difficult and scandalous situation in which they are put by the hand which appoints them, they ought at least to have the guarantee and assurance, very relative and ineffectual though it be, of irremovability. But they have not got it.
The purchase of offices was abolished and replaced by a two-fold election; in all grades of the magistracy, when an office was vacant, the judges were to assemble to select three persons, from whom the king should be bound to choose. The irremovability of the magistrates, which had been accepted but often violated by Louis XI., became under Louis XII. a fundamental rule.
After this act of courage, it decreed the irremovability of its members, and the incompetence of any who might usurp their functions. This bold manifesto was followed by the arrest of two members, d'Epremenil and Goislard, by the reform of the body, and the establishment of a plenary court.
"France," said the resolution, "is a monarchy hereditary from male to male, governed by the king following the laws; it has for fundamental laws the nation's right to freely grant subsidies by means of the States-general convoked and composed according to regulation, the customs and capitulations of the provinces, the irremovability of the magistrates, the right of the courts to enregister edicts, and that of each citizen to be judged only by his natural judges, without liability ever to be arrested arbitrarily."
They next set before me, as a terrible warning, my uncle, another brother of my father's, who had gone to the Bar, and I will not say never had any practice, for I believe he practised a good deal on the Norfolk Broads, and once had a brief at sessions concerning the irremovability of a pauper, which he conducted much to the satisfaction of the pauper, although I believe the solicitor never gave him another brief.
The prospect was not exhilarating for any one who had to perform the drudgery of the first few years of a junior's life; nevertheless, I was not cast down by the mere apprehension, or rather the mere possibility of failure, for when I looked round on my competitors I was encouraged by the thought that dear old Woollet knew more about a rate appeal than Littledale himself, while old Peter Ryland, with his inimitable Saxon, was quite as good at the irremovability of a pauper as Codd was in accounting for the illegal removal of a duck, and both in their several branches of knowledge more learned than Alderson or Bayley.
Apply universal suffrage and the system of elective grades to judicial functions in the same way as to ecclesiastic; take away their irremovability which is the denial of the right of election; take away from the State all action and influence upon the judges; let this order, centralised in and for itself, arise solely from the people, and you have taken away from the State its most powerful implement of tyranny.
Bentham, have been of opinion that, although it is better that judges should not be appointed by popular election, the people of their district ought to have the power, after sufficient experience, of removing them from their trust. It can not be denied that the irremovability of any public officer to whom great interests are intrusted is in itself an evil.
With regard to stability, men of stable character need no vow to guarantee adherence to a divine vocation, and men of feeble character may indeed vow themselves into an outward stability, but it is of little fruit to themselves personally, and their irremovability is often of infinite distress to their superiors and brethren.
The judicial functions with their different specialties, their hierarchy, their irremovability, their union in a single ministry testify undoubtedly to their privileged position and their efforts towards centralisation.
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