ject only to overruling by
higher courts in the exercise of _their_ pleasure; for great as is the
number of minor and major tribunals, a case originating in the lowest is
never really settled until it has gone through all the intermediate ones
and been passed upon by the highest, to which it might just as well have
been submitted at first. The evils of this astonishing system could not be
even baldly catalogued in a lifetime. They are infinite in number and
prodigious in magnitude. To the trained intelligence of the American
observer it is incomprehensible how any, even the most barbarous, nation
can endure them.

An important function of the Great Court and the Minor Great Court is
passing upon the validity of all laws enacted by the Supreme Council and
the Subordinate Councils, respectively. The nation as a whole, as well as
each separate island, has a fundamental law called the _Trogodal_, or, as
we should say, the Constitution; and no law whatever that may be passed by
the Council is final and determinate until the appropriate court has
declared that it conforms to the Trogodal. Nevertheless every law is put
in force the moment it is perfected and before it is submitted to the
court. Indeed, not one in a thousand ever is submitted at all, that
depending upon the possibility of some individual objecting to its action
upon his personal interests, which few, indeed, can afford to do. It not
infrequently occurs that some law which has for years been rigorously
enforced, even by fines and imprisonment, and to which the whole
commercial and social life of the nation has adjusted itself with all its
vast property interests, is brought before the tribunal having final
jurisdiction in the matter and coolly declared no law at all. The
pernicious effect may be more easily imagined than related, but those who
by loyal obedience to the statute all those years have been injured in
property, those who are ruined by its erasure and those who may have
suffered the severest penalties for its violation are alike without
redress. It seems not to have occurred to the Tortirrans to require the
court to inspect the law and determine its validity before it is put in
force. It is, indeed, the traditional practice of these strange tribunals,
when a case is forced upon them, to decide, not as many points of law as
they can, but as few as they may; and this dishonest inaction is not only
tolerated but commended as the highest wisdom. The conseq