the land, what the rights of juries, or what the liberty of the
press should be. My law should not depend upon the fluctuation of the
closet, or the complexion of men. Whether a black-haired man or a fair-
haired man presided in the Court of King's Bench, I would have the law
the same: the same whether he was born in _domo regnatrice_, and sucked
from his infancy the milk of courts, or was nurtured in the rugged
discipline of a popular opposition. This law of court cabal and of
party, this _mens quaedam nullo perturbata affectu_, this law of
complexion, ought not to be endured for a moment in a country whose being
depends upon the certainty, clearness, and stability of institutions.

Now I come to the last substitute for the proposed bill, the spirit of
juries operating their own jurisdiction. This, I confess, I think the
worst of all, for the same reasons on which I objected to the others, and
for other weighty reasons besides which are separate and distinct. First,
because juries, being taken at random out of a mass of men infinitely
large, must be of characters as various as the body they arise from is
large in its extent. If the judges differ in their complexions, much
more will a jury. A timid jury will give way to an awful judge
delivering oracularly the law, and charging them on their oaths, and
putting it home to their consciences, to beware of judging where the law
had given them no competence. We know that they will do so, they have
done so in a hundred instances; a respectable member of your own house,
no vulgar man, tells you that on the authority of a judge he found a man
guilty, in whom, at the same time, he could find no guilt. But supposing
them full of knowledge and full of manly confidence in themselves, how
will their knowledge, or their confidence, inform or inspirit others?
They give no reason for their verdict, they can but condemn or acquit;
and no man can tell the motives on which they have acquitted or
condemned. So that this hope of the power of juries to assert their own
jurisdiction must be a principle blind, as being without reason, and as
changeable as the complexion of men and the temper of the times.

But, after all, is it fit that this dishonourable contention between the
court and juries should subsist any longer? On what principle is it that
a jury refuses to be directed by the court as to his competence? Whether
a libel or no libel be a question of law or of fact may be dou