ner as to resemble, as it ought, the great Author of all law,
in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning.
As to their succession I have just the same opinion. I would not leave
it to the chances of promotion, or to the characters of lawyers, what
the law of the land, what the rights of juries, or what the liberty of
the press should be. My law should not depend upon the fluctuation of
the closet or the complexion of men. Whether a black-haired man or a
fair-haired man presided in the Court of King's Bench, I would have the
law the same; the same, whether he was born _in domo regnatrice_ and
sucked from his infancy the milk of courts, or was nurtured in the
rugged discipline of a popular opposition. This law of court cabal and
of party, this _mens quaedam nullo perturbata affectu_, this law of
complexion, ought not to be endured for a moment in a country whose
being depends upon the certainty, clearness, and stability of
institutions.
Now I come to the last substitute for the proposed bill,--the spirit of
juries operating their own jurisdiction. This I confess I think the
worst of all, for the same reasons on which I objected to the
others,--and for other weighty reasons besides, which are separate and
distinct. First, because juries, being taken at random out of a mass of
men infinitely large, must be of characters as various as the body they
arise from is large in its extent. If the judges differ in their
complexions, much more will a jury. A timid jury will give way to an
awful judge delivering oracularly the law, and charging them on their
oaths, and putting it home to their consciences to beware of judging,
where the law had given them no competence. We know that they will do
so, they have done so in an hundred instances. A respectable member of
your own House, no vulgar man, tells you, that, on the authority of a
judge, he found a man guilty in whom at the same time he could find no
guilt. But supposing them full of knowledge and full of manly confidence
in themselves, how will their knowledge or their confidence inform or
inspirit others? They give no reason for their verdict, they can but
condemn or acquit; and no man can tell the motives on which they have
acquitted or condemned. So that this hope of the power of juries to
assert their own jurisdiction must be a principle blind, as being
without reason, and as changeable as the complexion of men and the
temper of the times.
But, after all, is i
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