tottering with fatigue, to make an effort which was almost beyond his strength.[547] The old criminal trial of the English courts had been conducted strictly on the inquisitorial method of procedure, a system admirably contrived for the conviction of the guilty, but by no means so successful in ensuring the acquittal of the innocent. Of this character it was robbed by the Puritan Revolution, which rendered the administrative methods of continental nations odious to the English mind. But in its place nothing so complete or logical remained. The changes which were then introduced, beneficent as they were, did not institute an order capable, in the interest of justice and of the state, of guaranteeing the discovery of the truth or of safeguarding the rights of the individual. The rigorous system of preliminary procedure, the denial of counsel to assist the accused, the ignorance of the art of cross-examination and of the science of sifting evidence, combined to set judge, jury, and prisoner alike at the mercy of every man of villainy sufficient to swear away a man’s life by a false oath, and of impudence sufficient to brazen out his perjury.[548] Not until greater knowledge of the principles of judicial administration was gained by a long and harsh experience, and until a more stable state of society produced the possibility of treating accused persons with the generosity which is characteristic of modern criminal procedure, were these evils remedied. Society, as it was in the latter half of the seventeenth century, could neither afford nor pretend to be generous to the prisoner at the bar. In these latter days when a man comes to be tried, the jury are told that it is their first duty to believe him innocent until he is proved to be guilty. The burden of that proof lies heavily upon the shoulders of those who conduct the prosecution. Whatever doubt may exist is counted to the benefit of the accused. He is treated throughout with studied consideration. But when the fourteen men who died for the Popish Plot were brought to the bar, all this was unheard of. Then the prisoner came into court already in the minds of all men half proved an enemy to the king’s majesty, and one to whom no more advantage than was his strict right could be allowed. To the satisfaction of one jury, indeed, he had been actually proved guilty, for the grand jurors “for our Lord the King” had presented upon their oaths that the prisoner “wilfully, feloniously, and of his malice aforethought” had committed the crime for which he was arraigned. Why should he be accounted innocent, to whose guilt at least twelve good men and true had positively sworn? The presumptive innocence of the accused is a modern fiction which has tacitly grown up in a society conscious that its strength is too firm to be shaken by the misdeeds of single offenders, and therefore willing that any individual suspected of offence against its laws shall retain all the advantages on his own side. Before this