Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
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 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?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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