Again, this tendency of judges is restrained and corrected by the publicity of the discussions. And all, or nearly all, the famous and oft-repeated instances of judicial errors go back to the time of the inquisitorial and secret trial--in regard to which an interesting historical problem presents itself; that is to say the co-existence of the inquisitorial trial, which impairs every individual guarantee, with the political liberties of the medi<ae>val Italian republics. <p 194> This is why the number of acquittals, and of the admission of extenuating circumstances, is always very remarkable, even in the Correctional Tribunals, which in Italy show proportions not greatly differing from those of the Assize Courts. We must remember that, under our modern penal procedure, it is not the individual guarantees that are lacking, such as the assigning of reasons for the sentence, the almost total abolition of punishments which cannot be reconsidered, appeals, reversals, revision, which would be still more efficacious under the positive system which we propose. One logical consequence of the psychological objection raised against judges would be the granting of a jury even in the Correctional Tribunals, though the experience which we have of it in the Assize Courts is not so encouraging as to leave many advocates of a jury in the minor courts. But a decisive objection, founded on the most positive data of sociology, can be raised against the jury. The law of natural evolution proves that no variation in the vegetable or animal organism is useful or durable which is not the outcome of a slow and gradual preparation by organic forces and external conditions. Thus an organ which ceases to have a function to discharge is subject to atrophy, and no new organ is possible or capable of development if it is not required by a new function to which it corresponds. What has been said of organic variations is also true of social institutions. And when the jury is contemplated from this point of view, we see that <p 195>it has been artificially grafted by a stroke of the legislator's pen on the judicial institutions of the continent, without the long-continued, spontaneous and organic connections which it had, for instance, with the English people. The jury had even disappeared from the continental countries in which it had left traces of former existence; for it had not found in the race-characteristics or the social organism that favourable environment which is supplied in England by the natural groundwork of institutions and principles which, as Mittermaier says, are its necessary correlative. The jury, as it has been politically established on the continent of Europe, is what Spencer calls a false membrane in the social organism, having no physiological connection with the rest of the body politic. So that it is not yet acclimatised, even in France, after a century of uninterrupted trial.[18]