Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/312

298 of what is done. "When a judge sentences a prisoner, he says, in effect: "Do not blame me, I pray you. You have been condemned by the 'unanimous' verdict of twelve of your fellows. I am but the mouth-piece of the law to pass sentence according to their verdict." Of course this is not so. In a great proportion of cases the very reverse is the case. The jury are, in fact, but the mouth-piece of the judge to render a verdict, the responsibility of which he wishes to be relieved of.

Let us ask ourselves if there really is anything to be gained by the continuance of a system so full of incongruities. People are commencing to ask this question now. One authority says, "Apart from any incidental defects, it may be doubted whether, as an instrument for the investigation of truth, the jury deserves all the encomiums that have been passed upon it." But the same writer goes on to point out that, while the jury might with advantage be dispensed with in civil cases, "opinion in England is unanimously against subjecting a man to serious punishment without the verdict of a jury, and the judges themselves," he adds, "would be the first to deprecate so great a responsibility." But that public sentiment is in favor of the jury system does not prove it to be the best, even in criminal cases. Mere sentiment is not an argument for the continuance of any system, and moral cowardice is not even an apology for one. Every system, every institution, however useful in the past, whatever may be its claims on the reverence or affection of mankind, must, sooner or later, be brought to the test of present and practical worth. In the Bank of England one is shown a very delicate and ingenious instrument for weighing coins. The coins pass up a tube, at the top of which they pause for a moment and are weighed. If good, they drop into a receiver on the one hand; if bad, they infallibly go to the other. No human agency is visible, yet each in its turn which does not come up to the standard of this remorseless little instrument is cast aside and rejected. All the institutions of the past are coins for which the age has invented weighing-machines. Each must come up to the standard of actual value, of undoubted utility, or be cast aside. The jury system will be no exception to these. In several countries it is now only used in civil matters. Throughout the Austrian Empire it has been abolished entirely. Law everywhere is undergoing a process of simplification. In English speaking countries in particular it has, during the last few years, been purged of many abuses, stripped of much that was useless, and, in a few years more, trial by jury will also be swept away.