Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/270

 sense of a jury is really helpful to the judge, and constitutes a check upon his prejudice or impatience. There was a time when the jury was a genuine safeguard against oppression in private as well as Crown cases, and it is like us, as a nation, to have retained them when their usefulness in this respect was happily obsolete. But it seems to the writer pretty certain that in civil trials juries will have been dispensed with long before the end of this century, and this dispensation will probably be the stepping-stone to a system whereby criminal causes will be tried by a bench of judges, instead of by a judge and jury. The whole tendency of modern conditions (in which must be included our growing, and highly discreditable, individual impatience of the trouble of jury-service) seems to point to this.

Reforms of judicial procedure of course