Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/417

 CHANGES AT ATHENS UNDER PERIKLES. 393 as good as justice, — but not exempt from sympathies, antipa- thies, and prejudices, all of which act the more powerfully be- cause there is often no consciousness of their presence, and because they even appear essential to his idea of plain and straight-forward good sense. According as a jury are composed of Catholics or Protestants, Irishmen or Englishmen, tradesmen, farmers, or inhabitants of a frontier on which smuggling prevails, there is apt to prevail among them a corresponding bias : at the time of any great national delusion, such as the Popish Plot, — or of any powerful local excitement, such as that of the Church and King mobs, at Birmingham, in 1791, against Dr. Priestley and the Dissenters, — juries are found to perpetrate what a calmer age recognizes to have been gross injustice. A jury who disapprove of the infliction of capital punishment for a particular crime, wiU acquit prisoners in spite of the clearest evidence of guilt. It is probable that a delinquent, indicted for any staite offence before the dikastery, at Athens, — having only a private accuser to contend against, with equal power of speaking in his own defence, of summoning witnesses, and of procuring friends to speak for him, — would have better chance of a fair trial than he would now have anywhere, except in England and the United States of America ; and better than he would have had in Eng- land down to the seventeenth century.i Juries bring the com- ceedings against persons accused of state offences, in the earlier periods of our history, do not deserve the name of trials : they were a mere mockery of justice," etc. Eespecting what English juries have been, it is curious to peruse the fol- lowing remarks of Mr. Daines Barrington, Observations on the Statutes, p. 409. In remarking on a statute of Henry the Seventh, a.d. 1494, he says : '• The twenty-first chapter recites : ' That perjury is much and custom- arily used within the city of London, among such persons as passen aud been impannelled in issue, joined between party and party.' " This offence hath been before this statute complained of in preambles to several laws, being always the perjury of a juror, who finds a verdict con- trary to his oath, and not that which we hear too much of at present, in the witnesses produced at a trial. " In the Dance of Death, written originally in French, by Macharel, and translated by John Lydgate in this reign, with some additions, to adapt it to English characters. — a jurvman is mentioned, who had often been 17*
 * Jlr. Jardine (Ci-iminal Trials, Introduct. p. 8) observes, that the "pro-