, who died in 1860, and wrote this passage at
least some years previously, cannot be referring to any of the
events which culminated in 1870. The whole passage forms a striking
illustration of his political sagacity.]

The English show their great intelligence, amongst other ways, by
clinging to their ancient institutions, customs and usages, and by
holding them sacred, even at the risk of carrying this tenacity too
far, and making it ridiculous. They hold them sacred for the simple
reason that those institutions and customs are not the invention of an
idle head, but have grown up gradually by the force of circumstance
and the wisdom of life itself, and are therefore suited to them as a
nation. On the other hand, the German Michel[1] allows himself to be
persuaded by his schoolmaster that he must go about in an English
dress-coat, and that nothing else will do. Accordingly he has bullied
his father into giving it to him; and with his awkward manners this
ungainly creature presents in it a sufficiently ridiculous figure. But
the dress-coat will some day be too tight for him and incommode him.
It will not be very long before he feels it in trial by jury. This
institution arose in the most barbarous period of the Middle Ages--the
times of Alfred the Great, when the ability to read and write exempted
a man from the penalty of death. It is the worst of all criminal
procedures. Instead of judges, well versed in law and of great
experience, who have grown grey in daily unravelling the tricks and
wiles of thieves, murderers and rascals of all sorts, and so are well
able to get at the bottom of things, it is gossiping tailors and
tanners who sit in judgment; it is their coarse, crude, unpractised,
and awkward intelligence, incapable of any sustained attention, that
is called upon to find out the truth from a tissue of lies and deceit.
All the time, moreover, they are thinking of their cloth and their
leather, and longing to be at home; and they have absolutely no clear
notion at all of the distinction between probability and certainty. It
is with this sort of a calculus of probabilities in their stupid heads
that they confidently undertake to seal a man's doom.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--It may be well to explain that
"Michel" is sometimes used by the Germans as a nickname of their
nation, corresponding to "John Bull" as a nickname of the English.
Fluegel in his German-English Dictionary declares that _der deutsche
Mi