for nothing in producing that calm, firm, passionless state of mind
which is essential in those who determine causes between party and
party?

Are not juries quite as often as judges swayed by popular clamor, by
prejudice, by appeals to their passions, and by considerations foreign
to the merits of the case? As Mr. Thomas asks in the article before
quoted: "How many juries are strictly impartial? How many remain
entirely uninfluenced by preference for one or the other of the parties,
one or the other counsel, or the leaning of some friend to either, or by
political affiliations, or church connections, or relations to secret
societies, or by what they have heard, or by what they have read? Can
they be as discerning and impartial as a bench of judges, or if inclined
to some bias or prejudice, can they as readily as a judge divest their
minds of such an impression?" If it be true that juries composed of such
material as Judge Pitman shows our juries to be largely composed of, are
as capable of mastering and determining intricate questions of fact as
judges trained to that duty, then we may truly say--

"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And naught is everything, and everything is naught."

According to Judge Pitman, the system which prevails in some of the
states, of trials by the court without juries (with the provision that
the trial shall be by jury if either party demand it), "works
satisfactorily." The testimony of lawyers and litigants in
Massachusetts, Connecticut and other states where this system prevails,
is to the same effect. For ourselves, while far from desiring the
abolition of trial by jury, whether in civil or in criminal causes, we
are by no means disposed to "throw glamour" (as the Scotch say), over an