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 a
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