Thus we see that the statement which is so often made and accepted, that this law applies only to prostitutes, is calculated to exercise a blinding and confusing influence over the public mind in this question. It seems to be commonly assumed _that some decisive tribunal which has gone before has already decided that weighty matter_ which marks out those who are fit subjects for the operation of this law; and at other times it is assumed with an astonishing boldness on the part of some, and credulity on the part of others, either that these persons have by some overt act of their own marked themselves out as immoral characters, or that society possesses some divining-rod by which this class of persons may be distinctly marked off from all others. So far is this from being the case, that every one who has any experience of the poorer classes, knows that there is no point where an exact line of distinction can be drawn, but that there is every degree of shade between the absolutely virtuous woman and the most degraded and evident harlot. It is well known that among the poor there are thousands who are unchaste, but whom it would be an act of supreme injustice and cruelty to bring under this Act. And therefore this infringement of the constitutional forms of justice is the more to be deplored, considering the difficulty and delicacy of the distinctions of the cases which are by this Act brought before such a wretchedly inadequate tribunal as a single justice of peace, enlightened, not by facts, but by the credulity of a single policeman. Justices of the peace may be very good men, but they are not fitted to be sole and irresponsible judges in such a solemn and difficult question as they are required to determine under these Acts, nor, if we remember aright, has the generally received opinion of the character of “justice’s justice” been usually such as to warrant the unlimited trust which we are here called on to repose in them. Even admitting that in every instance they are the best men in the world, they have, if we remember aright what the generally received opinion is, been believed to be rather liable to err,[30] and in any event we must still remember that sentence, already quoted, of Junius, that laws are intended not to trust to what justices of the peace will do, but to guard against what they may do. It is perfectly true certainly that jurymen are fallible as well as justices of the peace; nay, that they may be even in individual instances corrupt and foolish, but that form of trial, with its publicity, and all its other accompaniments, which has been found in other cases to be the necessary “bulwark of northern liberty,” is not likely to be capable of being so easily dispensed with in this.[31]