Still further, these judges thus appointed become familiar with fraud, violence, cruelty, selfishness,--refined or brutal,--which comes before them; they study the technicalities of the statutes, balance the scruples of advocates; they lose their fresh intuitions of justice, becoming more and more legal, less and less human, less natural and more technical; their eye is microscopic in its niceness of discrimination, microscopic also in its narrowness of range. They forget the universality of justice,--the End which laws should aim at; they direct their lynx-eyed attention to the speciality of the statutes which is only the Means, of no value save as conducing to that end. Their understanding is sharp as a mole's eye for the minute distinctions of the technicalities of their craft; but, as short-sighted as the mole, they cannot look at justice. So they come to acknowledge no obligation but the legal, and know no law except what is written in Black Letter on parchment, printed in statute-books, reported in decisions; the Law written by God on the soul of man they know not, only the statute and decision bound in pale sheepskin. In the logic of legal deduction--technical inference--they forget the intuition of conscience: not What is right? but What is law? is the question, and they pay the same deference to a wicked statute as a just one. So the true Mussulman values the absurdities of the Koran as much as its noblest wisdom and tenderest humanity. Such a man so appointed, so disciplined, will administer the law fairly enough in civil cases between party and party, where he has no special interest to give him a bias--for he cares not whether John Doe or Richard Roe gain the parcel of ground in litigation before him. But in criminal cases he leans to severity, not mercy; he suspects the People; he reverences the government. In political trials he never forgets the hand that feeds him,--Charles Stuart, George Guelph, or the Slave Power of America. These things being so, in such trials you see the exceeding value of the jury, who are not Office-holders, under obligation to the hand that feeds them; not Office-seekers, willing to prostitute their faculties to the service of some overmastering lust; not lawyers wonted to nice technicalities; not members of a class, with its special discipline and peculiar prejudices; but men with their moral instincts normally active, and unsophisticated humanity in their hearts. Hence the great value of the jury in criminal trials. Gentlemen, you are the jurors in this case, to decide between me and the government. Between the government and ME! no, Gentlemen, between the Fugitive Slave Bill and Humanity. You know the Function of the court--the manner of the Judges' appointment--the services they are expected to render in cases like this, the services they have already rendered.