For the rich and great there may be little danger in dispensing with jury trial in this particular instance. As there are classes in society whose position and wealth place them above any chance of being erroneously accused of theft, so there are classes whose position, wealth, and surroundings place the women belonging to them equally above any chance of being erroneously accused of being prostitutes. To this fact we may probably trace the apathy and indifference of so many of the upper classes to the passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the urbanity with which they assure us that our fears are ungrounded, and that the operation of these Acts can seldom err. Again we must quote the words of Junius, “Laws are intended not to trust to what men will do, but to guard against what they may do.” But, at the same time, can we accept the assurance that the action of the officials who carry out these Acts will never be in error? We certainly cannot. Ladies who ride in their carriages through the streets at night are in little danger of being molested. But what of working women? What of the daughters, sisters, wives of working men, out, it may be on an errand of mercy, at night? And what, most of all, of that girl whose father, mother, friends are dead, or far away, who is struggling hard, in a hard world, to live uprightly and justly by the work of her own hands,—is she in no danger from this law? Lonely, and friendless, and poor, is she in no danger of a false accusation from malice or from error? especially since one clause of the Act particularly marks out _homeless_ girls as just subjects for its operation. And what has she, if accused, to rely on, under God, except that of which this law has deprived her, the appeal to be tried “by God and my country; by which she is understood to claim to be tried by a jury, and to have all the judicial means of defence to which the law entitles her.”[32]