Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/268

 law it would be tedious to attempt to foresee all the reforms of which the growing complexity of human affairs will certainly impose the necessity upon us. The clumsiness of a system by which important civil cases have to be tried three times, in ways differing in detail, before a final decision is reached, needs no insisting upon: and there is a manifest inconsistency in the fact that an action about a matter worth £101 can be twice appealed, while a man tried for his life, or something even more important than life, has no appeal at all against an adverse verdict, except to a secret tribunal of Civil Service clerks—for in the "commutation" of sentences the Crown stands for the Home Secretary, and the Home Secretary is necessarily obliged to depend upon his assistants, who in their turn may very possibly have to derive their information from officials whose credit would be damaged if some fact favourable to the prisoner came out. To admit this inconsistency is not by any means equivalent to admitting the necessity for courts of criminal appeal: and anyone who knows the methods of criminal jurisprudence in the United States must recognise that such courts are capable of abuse highly dangerous to public morality, so dependent upon respect for law. But with the great increase in scrupulosity and in the mildness of public temper which the tendencies of human development clearly vaticinate for the