the chain, and so many invalidations of their right.

You cannot open your statute book without seeing positive provisions
relative to every right of the subject. This business of juries is
the subject of not fewer than a dozen. To suppose that juries are
something innate in the Constitution of Great Britain, that they
have jumped, like Minerva, out of the head of Jove in complete
armour, is a weak fancy, supported neither by precedent nor by
reason. Whatever is most ancient and venerable in our Constitution,
royal prerogative, privileges of parliament, rights of elections,
authority of courts, juries, must have been modelled according to
the occasion. I spare your patience, and I pay a compliment to your
understanding, in not attempting to prove that anything so elaborate
and artificial as a jury was not the work of chance, but a matter of
institution, brought to its present state by the joint efforts of
legislative authority and juridical prudence. It need not be
ashamed of being (what in many parts of it at least it is) the
offspring of an Act of Parliament, unless it is a shame for our laws
to be the results of our legislature. Juries, which sensitively
shrank from the rude touch of parliamentary remedy, have been the
subject of not fewer than, I think, forty-three Acts of Parliament,
in which they have been changed with all the authority of a creator
over its creature, from Magna Charta to the great alterations which
were made in the 29th of George II.

To talk of this matter in any other way is to turn a rational
principle into an idle and vulgar superstition, like the antiquary,
Dr. Woodward, who trembled to have his shield scoured, for fear it
should be discovered to be no better than an old pot-lid. This
species of tenderness to a jury puts me in mind of a gentleman of