Now, let us ask our opponents “why, in this matter, did they dispense with jury trial?” The only answer they could consistently give is, that if jury trial were adopted, the law would not work. If that be so, these Acts are condemned by that very admission. This test distinguishes at once the case in question from all other summary cases, for let us suppose any other case whatsoever now comprised among these treated as summary cases to be brought to the test of jury trial, and let us see what would be the result. It would be, not the miscarriage of the case, but the clearer and fuller establishment of justice, though at the expense of delay and the employment of greater machinery than the case might perhaps demand. The real reason for dispensing with this safeguard, however, we suspect is to be found in the same selfishness which prompted the Act, namely, that tender regard for the erring man, which is by no means extended to either the frail or the virtuous woman. It would manifestly be inconvenient and disagreeable to those gentlemen, for whose fancied benefit these Acts were made, to be constantly in danger of being called up as witnesses to the immoral character of certain of their female companions, it may be of some poor girl introduced by their seduction into the paths of vice. For it is, unfortunately for them, a maxim of the Common Law of England, “that the best evidence the nature of the case will admit of shall always be required, if possible to be had,”[47] and the best and most direct evidence in this case is very clearly that of the male accomplices of the woman whose character is the subject of trial; wherefore we do not need to go far to discover why it is that the persons who have found it needful to make these Acts should have also found it needful to do away with jury trial. For these reasons, and for others to be cited in an ensuing chapter, I can characterize these Acts as nothing other than a gross violation of the constitution of this country, whereby there is established a sort of press-gang, by which women are pressed into the ranks of vice by the shortest and easiest way possible, for the purpose of serving the lusts of men. CHAPTER IV. I shall in this chapter give some portion of a debate which took place in the House of Lords in the year 1736, on the occasion of an attempt made by Parliament to introduce a Bill against smugglers, so curiously similar in many points to the Acts under discussion, that I feel it not needful to apologize for introducing it in the present Essay, but call the reader’s attention very markedly to the whole matter, inasmuch as many arguments which have been advanced, on one side or the other, in the discussion in which we are now engaged, were also advanced there, as the reader can himself see.