“Every new tribunal,” says Blackstone,[28] “erected for the decision of facts without the intervention of a jury (whether composed of justices of the peace, commissioners of the revenue, judges of a court of conscience, or any other standing magistrates), is a step towards establishing aristocracy, the most oppressive of absolute governments.” We are very near being threatened by this absolutism which Blackstone dreads, when we find that this newly erected tribunal is placed under the control of the least responsible, most arbitrary, and most aristocratic portion of all the public offices, and which have ere this been made the tool of dangerous attacks on English liberty. In answer to all this argument we shall be undoubtedly met with the assurance that the decisions of this tribunal will seldom err, because honourable and upright men will be employed; that the case is always one of such perfect clearness, that it needs only ordinary judgment and care to decide it, and that the chances of false accusation are thus reduced to a minimum.[29] Concerning this argument, it is well to relate that a gentleman once, who despised what in his estimation were unnecessary precisenesses of mathematics, on being asked to find the centre of a circle, after having inspected it for some time said, touching with his finger a spot near the middle, “Sir, I think it will be _about there_.” Although he may have come within a minimum of the centre by this tentative method, his answer would by no means satisfy the geometrician, and in the same way it cannot satisfy the lover of justice that justice should probably be _about there_—for “Laws,” as Junius says extremely well, “are intended not to trust to what men will do, but to guard against what they may do.”