Some lessons for civilian justice to be learned from military justice.

• Author: Wigmore, John H.

1. The prime object of military organization is Victory, not Justice. The Army's object is to kill, disable, or capture our enemy before he can kill or capture us. In that death-struggle which is ever impending, the Army, which defends the Nation, is strained by the terrific consciousness that the Nation's life and its own is every moment at stake. No other objective than Victory can have first place in its thoughts; there is never any remission of that strain. If "the Army can do Justice to its men, well and good. But Justice is always secondary; and Victory is always primary.

   This cardinal truth will explain why it is not always feasible to do exact Justice in the Army, in the midst of war.

2. But I am not here to defend military justice. It is civilian justice that is upon the defensive. It has been on the defensive for a generation past. It has done very little in that generation to take up that defensive. It is doing very little now.

   This Bar Association, and every Bar Association, has a prime duty to improve civilian justice.

   Civilian justice will have to remain on the defensive until it can show that it is at least as efficient in its machinery as military justice. When civilian justice shall have adopted all the efficient measures now already possessed by military justice, and capable of equal use by civilian justice, then and not till then can it start a counter-offensive.

3. The military system can say this for itself: It knows what it wants; and it systematically goes in and gets it.

   Civilian criminal justice does not even know what it wants; much less does it resolutely go in and get anything.

   Military justice wants discipline--that is, action in obedience to regulations and orders; this being absolutely necessary for prompt, competent, and decisive handling of masses of men. The court-martial system supplies the sanction of this discipline. It takes on the features of Justice-because it must naturally perform the process of inquiring, in a particular case, what was the regulation or order, and whether it was in fact obeyed. But its object is discipline.

   The civilian penal system, on the other hand, has not even formulated what it wants. Some still say Retribution to the individual; some say Prevention of other wrongdoers; some say not Retribution, but Reformation of the individual ; and most--ignore a fundamental element, viz., the public re-affirmation of the community's principles of right and wrong.

   Nor does the civilian system resolutely go about any one of these purposes. It maintains a substantive law which is a hodge-podge of inadequate and illogical definitions. It maintains a procedure which has not been revised for a century. It maintains a prosecuting personnel which is in large proportion crude and untrained and narrow-minded, and a defense personnel which is usually skilled only in evading the law. It maintains a judiciary personnel which seldom studies its large problems and which seldom understands more than the elementary features of its duty. It maintains a police which, in the rural regions, is often the match of Dogberry the ancient watchman, and in the city regions is frequently undermined by politics and petty intrigue. And it...