nd the hopes of the offender crushed, by
the voice of the foreman pronouncing, in a shrill but steady tone, the
awful word--Guilty!' Some persons, who hate all innovations, will
pronounce all this '_mummery_,' which is a very compendious piece of
criticism. For ourselves, though we cannot altogether agree with the
Experimentalist, who seems to build too much on an assumption that
nature and increasing intercourse with human life contribute nothing of
themselves without any artificial discipline to the evolution and
culture of the sense of justice and to the power of the understanding
for discovering where justice lies, yet thus much is evident, 1. That
the intellectual faculties must be sharpened by the constant habit of
discriminating the just and the unjust in concrete cases such as a real
experience of life produces; 2. That the moral sense must be deepened,
if it were only by looking back upon so large a body of decisions, and
thus measuring as it were, by the resistance which they had often
overcome arising out of their own immediate interest, the mightiness of
the conscientious power within which had compelled them to such
decisions; 3. That all sorts of forensic ability is thus cherished; and
much ability indeed of larger application: thus the logical faculty of
abstracting the essential from the accidental is involved in the summing
up of the judge; in the pleadings for and against are involved the
rhetorical arts of narrating facts perspicuously--of arranging arguments
in the best order of meeting (therefore of remembering) the
counter-arguments; of solving sophisms; of disentangling
misrepresentations--of weighing the value of probabilities--to say
nothing of elocution and the arts of style and diction which even the
records of the court and the committee (as is urged at p. 105) must tend
to cultivate: 4. (to descend to a humbler use) that in this way the
master is absolved from the grievous waste of time in administering
justice, which on the old system was always imperfect justice that it
might waste but little time, and which yet wasted much time though it
was imperfect justice. The author's own _moral_ of this innovation is as
follows (p. 76); and with this we shall leave the subject: 'We shall be
disappointed if the intelligent reader have not already discovered that
by the establishment of a system of legislation and jurisprudence
wherein the power of the master is bounded by general rules, and the
duties