making the appointments directly.

Then endless questions will arise about the best way of voting and
electing. If unipersonal ballot is adopted, the canton will nominate its
_juge de paix_, the district its tribunal, the region its Court, and the
whole country the Court of Appeal. In this arrangement there will be
the double drawback mentioned above; that is, varying interpretations of
justice according to districts, and no impartiality.

If, on the other hand, _scrutin de liste_ is adopted, the whole country
will choose all the magistrates and they will belong to the majority. In
this case there would be uniformity of justice but no impartiality. Any
intermediate system would combine the disadvantage of both plans. For
instance, if nominations are made in each division, all the magistrates
in Brittany will be white partisans, while in Provence they will be blue
partisans. In both cases they will be biassed, and such diversity as
there is will be merely a diversity of partiality and bias.

We are talking of the future, though not perhaps of a very distant one.
Let us deal with the present. The jury is still with us. Now the jury
combines absolute moral competence with absolute technical incompetence.
Democracy must always have incompetence in one form or another. A jury
is independent of everybody, both of the Government and of the people,
and in the best possible way, because it is the agent of the people
without being elected. It does not seek re-election and is rather vexed
than otherwise at being summoned to perform a disagreeable duty. On the
other hand it always vacillates between two emotions, between pity and
self-preservation, between feelings of humanity and the necessity for
social protection; it is equally sensitive to the eloquence of the
defending advocate, and the summing up of the prosecutor, and as these
two influences balance each other it is in a perfect moral condition for
delivering an equitable verdict.

For this reason the jury is of ancient origin, and has always been an
institution in the land. At Athens the tribunal of the Heliasts formed a
kind of jury, too numerous indeed and more like a public meeting, but
still a sort of jury.

At Rome, a better regulated republic, there were certain citizens chosen
by the praetor who settled questions of fact, that is to say, decided
whether an act had or had not been committed, whether a sum of money had
or had not been paid; and the question of law