Justice Stands Afar Off

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 26, 1916

Justice Stands Afar Off

IN the fifty-ninth chapter of Isaiah we have a vivid word-picture of conditions before Christ’s first advent. Among other things we are told that “judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey: and the Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgment.” We have long expected the same conditions to prevail before Christ’s second advent. It is coming to be recognized that to obtain justice for the poor man is very difficult. Frequently a man who has a just claim for a small sum of money, refrains from taking his case to court because he knows that though his claim is just, it would cost him more to collect the debt than he would gain, even though he won his case.

It is well that a movement has recently been started by the board of justices of the municipal court of New York, which, it is to be hoped, may extend eventually throughout the whole country, and may reduce greatly the “high cost of justice.” In New York a system is being provided in which the justices may act as conciliators or as arbitrators, doing away with jury trials. The system provides that a dispute may be submitted to any justice in court to act as conciliator or arbitrator, and after his decision has been agreed upon by both parties, it may be entered by the clerk of the court in the court records. Without question such a plan will expedite the application of the principles of justice, and greatly lessen the expense. It will do much toward doing away with the complaint against the law’s delays, yet it may have in it an element of danger, in that it will make unnecessary trial by jury in all but extreme cases.

The complaint against the delays of the law in other than suits for money, are also becoming more pronounced, and in many cases the people are taking the execution of the law into their own hands, with the result that there is great danger of an increasing rule of mob law. Something should certainly be done to help in the speedy execution of justice in serious civil suits or in criminal cases. When money is able to drag out a case against a rich man and free him from the punishment of the law by his being declared insane or by some other of the many ways of avoiding justice, one cannot but recognize that there is serious danger that justice will become so difficult for the poor to obtain that it may truly be said that “equity cannot enter.”