The same bias is more often found in juries. I remember a case in which my father, Serjeant Parry, defended a man named Smethurst, charged with the murder of his wife. He was admittedly guilty of bigamy, and so incensed were the jury with his misconduct that their bias carried them right by the mark of the medical testimony and landed them in the ditch of an unjust verdict of murder. The case was taken up by John Bright, one whose bias against all evil was as strong as any man's. The criminal was ultimately punished only for the crime he had committed. No one will contend that a bias against immorality is not a good bias and a good asset in the character of a judge and a man. But the best bias in the world will not aid you in attaining "the mark" unless it is directed by body and brain working together in harmony. And if it be asked if there are judges on the bench who are biassed towards or against capital or labour, railway companies, motor-buses, piano organs, Scotch drapers, moneylenders or other products of modern life, I must answer in all honesty that this is very probably the case. A fact that seems to be lost sight of in this insistence on the immaculate judge is that, after all, he is like other human beings, a forked radish with a fantastically carved head quaintly decorated by a horse-hair wig generously paid for by himself out of his slender salary. He is just as much the product of the age as one of yourselves. He has toddled about in the same nursery, learned in the same school, played at the same university and lived in the same society as the rest of the middle classes. Why should you expect in him a super-instinct towards futurist sociology? In the old days when everyone believed in witchcraft the judges believed in witchcraft. Chief Justice Hale solemnly laid it down as law that there must be such things as witches since there were laws made against witches, and it was not conceivable that laws should be made against that which did not exist. It was not, indeed, until the time of George II. that it ceased to be an offence to endeavour to raise the Devil by magic words and oblige him to execute your commands. Nowadays even the Devil himself is in danger of disestablishment, though my conservative views would lead me to maintain that he is still entitled to judicial notice, and I am inclined to the opinion that he is not yet surplusage in an indictment for perjury. In every age your judge will be tinged with the prejudices of his time and his class, and I cannot see how you can expect to grow middle-class judges in hot-beds of middle-class prejudices without the natural formation of a certain amount of middle-class bias in the thickness of their middle-class wood.