Of course, no judge, either of the present day, or perhaps within the last five hundred years, has admitted the right of a jury to judge of the _justice_ of a law, or to hold any law invalid for its injustice. Every judge asserts the power of the government to punish for acts that are intrinsically innocent, and which therefore involve or evince no criminal intent. To accommodate the administration of law to this principle, all judges, so far as I am aware, hold it to be unnecessary that an indictment should charge, or that a jury should find, that an act was done with a criminal intent, except in those cases where the act is _malum in se_,--criminal in itself. In all other cases, so far as I am aware, they hold it sufficient that the indictment charge, and consequently that the jury find, simply that the act was done "contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided;" in other words, contrary to the orders of the government. All these doctrines prevail universally among judges, and are, I think, uniformly practised upon in courts of justice; and they plainly involve the most absolute despotism on the part of the government. But there is still another doctrine that extensively, and perhaps most generally, prevails in practice, although judges are not agreed in regard to its soundness. It is this: that it is not even necessary that the jury should see or know, _for themselves_, what the law _is_ that is charged to have been violated; nor to see or know, _for themselves_, that the act charged was in violation of any law whatever;--but that it is sufficient that they be simply _told by the judge_ that any act whatever, charged in an indictment, is in violation of law, and that they are then bound blindly to receive the declaration as true, and convict a man accordingly, if they find that he has done the act charged. This doctrine is adopted by many among the most eminent judges, and the reasons for it are thus given by Lord Mansfield: "They (the jury) do not know, and are not presumed to know, the law. They are not sworn to decide the law;[105] they are not required to do it.... The jury ought not to assume the jurisdiction of law. They do not know, and are not presumed to know, anything of the matter. They do not understand the language in which it is conceived, or the meaning of the terms. They have no rule to go by but their passions and wishes."--_3 Term Rep._, 428, note. What is this but saying that the people, who are supposed to be represented in juries, and who institute and support the government, (of course for the protection of their own rights and liberties, _as they understand them_, for plainly no other motive can be attributed to them,) are really the slaves of a despotic power, whose arbitrary commands even they are not supposed competent to understand, but for the transgression of which they are nevertheless to be punished as criminals?