or discharged the accused. Let me point out that this method is so
universally recognized as superior to the common electoral method that
any one who should propose to-day to take the fate of a man accused of
murder out of the hands of a jury and place it in the hands of any
British or American constituency whatever, even in the hands of such a
highly intelligent constituency as one of the British universities,
would be thought to be carrying crankiness beyond the border line of
sanity.

Why then should we not apply the Jury system to the electoral riddle?

Suppose, for example, at the end of the Parliamentary term, instead of
the present method of electing a member of Parliament, we were, with
every precaution of publicity and with the most ingeniously impartial
machine that could be invented, to select a Jury by lot, a Jury
sufficiently numerous to be reasonably representative of the general
feeling of the community and sufficiently small to be able to talk
easily together and to do the business without debating society
methods--between twenty and thirty, I think, might be a good working
number--and suppose we were, after a ceremony of swearing them and
perhaps after prayer or after a grave and dignified address to them
upon the duty that lay before them, to place each of these juries in
comfortable quarters for a few days and isolated from the world, to
choose its legislator. They could hear, in public, under a time limit,
the addresses of such candidates as had presented themselves, and they
could receive, under a limit of length and with proper precautions for
publicity, such documents as the candidates chose to submit. They could
also, in public, put any questions they chose to the candidates to
elucidate their intentions or their antecedents, and they might at any
stage decide unanimously to hear no more of and to dismiss this or that