was reserved for the
centumvirs.

In England the jury still exists and has existed for centuries.

These various peoples have considered very properly that juries are
excellently adapted for forming equitable decisions, since they possess
a greater moral competence for this particular function, than is to be
found elsewhere.

This is true; but on the other hand a jury has no intelligence. In
November 1909, a jury in the Cote d'Or before whom a murderer was being
tried, declared (1) that this man did not strike the blows, (2) that the
blows which he struck resulted in death. Thereupon the man was
acquitted, although his violence, which never took place, had a
murderous result.

In the Steinheil case in the same month and year, the jury's verdict
involved (1) that no one had been assassinated in the Steinheils' house,
and (2) that Mme Steinheil was not the daughter of Mme Japy. If a
verdict were a judgment this would have put an end to all attempts to
discover the assassins of M. Steinheil and Mme Japy, and on the other
hand there would have been terrible social complications.

But the verdict of a jury is not a judgment. Why? Because the legislator
foresaw the alarming absurdity of verdicts. It is presumed in law that
all juries' verdicts are absurd, and experience proves that this is
often the case. Juries' verdicts always seem to have been decided by lot
like those of the famous judge in Rabelais, and it is proverbial at the
law courts that it is impossible to foresee the issue of any case that
comes before a jury. It looks as if the jury reasoned thus: "I am a
chance judge, and it is only right that my judgment should be dictated
by chance."

Voltaire was in favour of the jury system, principally because he had
such a very low opinion of the magistrates of his day, whom he used to
compare to Busiris. But, with his usual inconsequence, he takes no pains
to conceal the fact that the populations of Abbeville and its
neighbourhood were unanimously exasperated against La Barre and
D'Etalonde, and the people of Toulouse against Calas, and all of them
would have been condemned by juries summoned from those districts as
surely as they were by the magisterial Busiris.

The jury system is nothing but a refined example of the cult of
incompetence. Society, having to defend itself against thieves and
murderers, lays the duty of defending it on some of its citizens, and
arms them with the weapon of the law. Unfortunately