Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Mankind in the Making by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
page 211 of 322 (65%)
invigorating sense of unhampered possibilities, that the democratic
idea involves. There is a way of choosing your public servants of all
sorts and effectually controlling public affairs on perfectly sound
democratic principles, _without ever having such a thing as an
election, as it is now understood, at all_, a way which will permit
of a deliberate choice between numerous candidates--a thing utterly
impossible under the current system--which will certainly raise the
average quality of our legislators, and be infinitely saner, juster,
and more deliberate than our present method. And, moreover, it is a way
that is typically the invention of the English people, and which they
use to-day in another precisely parallel application, an application
which they have elaborately tested and developed through a period of at
least seven or eight hundred years, and which I must confess myself
amazed to think has not already been applied to our public needs. This
way is the Jury system. The Jury system was devised to meet almost
exactly the same problem that faces us to-day, the problem of how on
the one hand to avoid putting a man's life or property into the hands
of a Ruler, a privileged person, whose interest might be unsympathetic
or hostile, while on the other protecting him from the tumultuous
judgments of a crowd--to save the accused from the arbitrary will of
King and Noble without flinging him to the mob. To-day it is exactly
that problem over again that our peoples have to solve, except that
instead of one individual affair we have now our general affairs to
place under a parallel system. As the community that had originally
been small enough and intimate enough to decide on the guilt or
innocence of its members grew to difficult proportions, there developed
this system of selecting by lot a number of its common citizens who
were sworn, who were then specially instructed and prepared, and who,
in an atmosphere of solemnity and responsibility in absolute contrast
with the uproar of a public polling, considered the case and condemned
DigitalOcean Referral Badge