for bettering the condition of his people the most remarkable was his establishment of a new Court of Justice.

In the East the oppression of the weak by the powerful is the most inveterate and universal of all evils, and the one that well-intentioned monarchs have to be most careful in checking and repressing.

Hormisdas, in his anxiety to root out this evil, is said to have set up a court expressly for the hearing of causes where complaint was made by the poor of wrongs done to them by the rich.

The duty of the judges was at once to punish the oppressors, and to see that ample reparation was made to those whom they had wronged.

To increase the authority of the court, and to secure the impartiality of its sentences, the monarch made a point of often presiding over it himself, of hearing the causes, and pronouncing the judgments in person.