Capitalists and financiers -- Fiction; Psychological fiction
Juries reach not so much definite conclusions as verdicts, in a curious
fashion and for curious reasons. Very often a jury will have concluded
little so far as its individual members are concerned and yet it will
have reached a verdict. The matter of time, as all lawyers know, plays
a part in this. Juries, speaking of the members collectively and
frequently individually, object to the amount of time it takes to
decide a case. They do not enjoy sitting and deliberating over a
problem unless it is tremendously fascinating. The ramifications or the
mystery of a syllogism can become a weariness and a bore. The jury-room
itself may and frequently does become a dull agony.
On the other hand, no jury contemplates a disagreement with any degree
of satisfaction. There is something so inherently constructive in the
human mind that to leave a problem unsolved is plain misery. It haunts
the average individual like any other important task left unfinished.
Men in a jury-room, like those scientifically demonstrated atoms of a
crystal which scientists and philosophers love to speculate upon, like
finally to arrange themselves into an orderly and artistic whole, to
present a compact, intellectual front, to be whatever they have set out
to be, properly and rightly—a compact, sensible jury. One sees this
same instinct magnificently displayed in every other phase of nature—in
the drifting of sea-wood to the Sargasso Sea, in the geometric
interrelation of air-bubbles on the surface of still water, in the
marvelous unreasoned architecture of so many insects and atomic forms
which make up the substance and the texture of this world. It would
seem as though the physical substance of life—this apparition of form
which the eye detects and calls real were shot through with some vast
subtlety that loves order, that is order. The atoms of our so-called
being, in spite of our so-called reason—the dreams of a mood—know where
to go and what to do. They represent an order, a wisdom, a willing that
is not of us. They build orderly in spite of us. So the subconscious
spirit of a jury. At the same time, one does not forget the strange
hypnotic effect of one personality on another, the varying effects of
varying types on each other, until a solution—to use the word in its
purely chemical sense—is reached. In a jury-room the thought or
determination of one or two or three men, if it be definite enough, is
likely to pervade the whole room and conquer the reason or the
opposition of the majority. One man “standing out” for the definite
thought that is in him is apt to become either the triumphant leader of
a pliant mass or the brutally battered target of a flaming,
concentrated intellectual fire. Men despise dull opposition that is
without reason. In a jury-room, of all places, a man is expected to
give a reason for the faith that is in him—if one is demanded. It will
not do to say, “I cannot agree.” Jurors have been known to fight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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