following grounds:  “Seeing that every human being, which is made in the image of Our Lord, should generally be free by natural right.”  The history of Christian communities is full of these happy inconsistencies; when a moral and just principle is implanted in the soul, absolute power itself does not completely escape from its healthy influence, and the good makes its way athwart the evil, just as a source of fresh and pure water ceases not to flow through and spread over a land wasted by the crimes or follies of men.

It is desirable to give an idea and an example of the conduct which was already beginning to be adopted and of the authority which was already beginning to be exercised in France, amidst the feudal reaction that set in against Philip the Handsome and amidst the feeble government of his sons, by that magistracy, of such recent and petty origin, which was called upon to defend, in the king’s name, order and justice against the count-less anarchical tyrannies scattered over the national territory.  During the early years of the fifteenth century, a lord of Gascony, Jordan de Lisle, “of most noble origin, but most ignoble deeds,” says a contemporary chronicler, “abandoned himself to all manner of irregularities and crimes.”  Confident in his strength and his connections,—­for Pope John XXII. had given his niece to him in marriage,—­“he committed homicides, entertained evil-doers and murderers, countenanced robbers, and rose against the king.  He killed, with the man’s own truncheon, one of the king’s servants who was wearing the royal livery according to the custom of the royal servants.  When his misdeeds were known, he was summoned for trial to Paris; and he went thither surrounded by a stately retinue of counts, nobles, and barons of Aquitaine.  He was confined, at first, in the prison of Chatelet; and when a hearing had been accorded to his reply and to what he alleged in his defence against the crimes of which he was accused, he was finally pronounced worthy of death by the doctors of the parliament, and on Trinity-eve he was dragged at the tail of horses and hanged, as he deserved, on the public gallows at Paris.”  It was, assuredly, a difficult and a dangerous task for the obscure members of this parliament, scarcely organized as it was and quite lately established for a permanence in Paris, to put down such disorders and such men.  In the course of its long career the French magistracy has committed many faults; it has more than once either aspired to overstep its proper limits or failed to fulfil all its duties; but history would be ungrateful and untruthful not to bring into the light the virtues this body has displayed from its humble cradle, and the services it has rendered to France, to her security at home, to her moral dignity, to her intellectual glory, and to the progress of her civilization with all its brilliancy and productiveness, though it is still so imperfect and so thwarted.