Yet not only is the ancient trial by
popular assemblies impossible in the great States of our day, but
also faith in the omniscience of the people has not availed to
prevent all kinds of limitations in the principle of the jury.
Thus the political principle of the jury is such that it cannot be
realised without misapprehension, limitation, and depreciation.
In fact, even in England, where the jury can of its own motion
declare in the verdict its opinions, strictures, and suggestions
of reform, as arising out of the trial, it is always subject to
the guidance of the judge, and it is not employed in the less
serious and most numerous cases, on which the whole decision is
left to magistrates, who apparently are not to be trusted to
decide upon crimes of a graver kind.
And as for the other political advantages of the jury, experience
shows us that the jury is often more injurious than serviceable to
liberty.
In the first place, in continental States the jury is but an
institution artificially grafted, by a stroke of the pen, on the
organism of the law, and has no vital connection or common roots
with this and other social organisms, as it has in England. Also
the example of classical antiquity is opposed to the institution
of the jury, which has been imposed upon us by eager imitation and
political symmetry; for if the jury had disappeared amongst
continental nations, this simply means that it did not find in the
ethnic types, the manners and customs, the physical and
social environments of these nations, an adequate supply of
vitality, such as it has retained, for instance through so many
historical changes, amongst the Anglo-Saxons.
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