For the past twenty-five years we have heard the cry upon all
sides that the jury system is a failure, and to this general
indictment is frequently added the specification that the
trials in our higher courts of criminal justice are the scenes
of grotesque buffoonery and merriment, where cynical juries
recklessly disregard their oaths and where morbid crowds flock
to satisfy the cravings of their imaginations for details of
blood and sexuality.

It is unnecessary to question the honesty of those who thus
picture the administration of criminal justice in America.
Indeed, thus it probably appears to them. But before such an
arraignment of present conditions in a highly civilized and
progressive nation is accepted as final, it is well to examine
into its inherent probabilities and test it by what we know of
the actual facts.

In the first place, it should be remembered that the jury was
instituted and designed to protect the English freeman from
tyranny upon the part of the crown. Judges were, and
sometimes still are, the creatures of a ruler or unduly
subject to his influence. And that ruler neither was, nor is,
always the head of the nation; but just as in the days of the
Normans he might have been a powerful earl whose influence
could make or unmake a judge, so to-day he may be none the
less a ruler if he exists in the person of a political boss
who has created the judge before whom his political enemy is
to be tried. The writer has seen more than one judge openly
striving to influence a jury to convict or to acquit a