should not complain that crime is increasing or the law
ineffective. It would be a most excellent thing for an
association of our leading citizens to interest itself in
criminal-law reform and demand and secure the passage of new
and effective legislation, but it would accomplish little if
its individual members continued to evade jury service and
left their most important duty to those least qualified by
education or experience to perform.* It would serve some
of this class of reformers right, if one day, when after a
life-time of evasion, they perchance came to be tried by a
jury of their peers, they should find that among their twelve
judges there was not one who could read or write the English
language with accuracy and that all were ready to convict
anybody because he lived in a brown-stone front.


*"The Citizen and the Jury," in "Moral Overstrain," by G.W.
Alger.


Merchants, who in return for a larger possible restitution
habitually compound felonies by tacitly agreeing not to
prosecute those who have defrauded them, have no right to
complain because juries acquit the offenders whom they finally
decide it to be worth their while to pursue. The voter who
has not the courage to insist that hypocritical laws should be
wiped from the statute books should express no surprise when
juries refuse to convict those who violate them. The man who
perjures himself to escape his taxes has no right to expect
that his fellow citizens are going to place a higher value