yond the cognisance of the royal official who called the jury
together, swore them, and registered their verdict. Trial by jury in
England might therefore have developed on the same lines as it did in
Athens, and have perished from the same causes. The number of the jury
might have been increased, and the parties in the case might have hired
advocates to write or deliver for them addresses containing distortions
of fact and appeals to prejudice as audacious as those in the _Private
Orations_ of Demosthenes. It might have become more important that the
witnesses should burst into passionate weeping than that they should
tell what they knew, and the final verdict might have been taken by a
show of hands, in a crowd that was rapidly degenerating into a mob. If
such an institution had lasted up to our time, the newspapers would have
taken sides in every important case. Each would have had its own version
of the facts, the most telling points of which would have been reserved
for the final edition on the eve of the verdict, and the fate of the
prisoner or defendant would often have depended upon a strictly party
vote.

[72] See, _e.g._, Stephen, _History of the Criminal Law_, vol. i. pp.
260-72.

But in the English jury trial it has come to be assumed, after a long
series of imperceptible and forgotten changes, that the opinion of the
jurors, instead of being formed before the trial begins, should be
formed in court. The process, therefore, by which that opinion is
produced has been more and more completely controlled and developed,
until it, and not the mere registration of the verdict, has become the
essential feature of the trial.

The jury are now separated from their fellow-men during the whole case.
They are introduced into a world of new emotional values. The ritual of
the court, the voices and dress of judge and counsel, all suggest an
environment in which the petty interests and impulses of ordinary life
are unimportant when compared with the supreme worth of truth and
justice. They are warned to empty their minds of all preconceived
inferences and affections. The examination and cross-examination of the
witnesses are carried on under rules of evidence which are the result of
centuries of experience, and which give many a man as he sits on a jury
his first lesson in the fallibility of the unobserved and uncontrolled
inferences of the human brain. The 'said I's,' and 'thought I's,' and
'said he's,' which are the m