diet; I would have found the house owner guilty of murder, arson, or larceny, with perfect impartiality. The general impres sion seemed to obtain that damages of some sort really should be awarded. I therefore suggested that we award the man twentyfive dollars. I urged this with all the elo quence at command, and it being only a question of mind over matter, I soon induced an agreement. We returned to the court room, the verdict was rendered, court ad journed, and I went away to take a Turkish bath. The days that followed were merely repetitions of these two. My public spirit was dissipated under the pressure; my reverence for the machinery of the law went into the hands of a receiver; and could I have been held for my feelings during those awful days, I should have been continually under arrest for contempt of court. When I was off duty, I sat in the court room and listened and pondered. I remembered to have heard somewhere about the privilege of being tried by a jury'of one's peers. Then I watched the head of a publishing house and a gentle man representing a big corporation awaiting the adjustment of their differences by this jury gathered in from the highways and hedges, this group of ignorant, illiterate men, and I knew I must be mistaken about that peer business. I wondered why it was not possible to have merchants' difficulties adjusted by a jury of merchants; profes sional men's by a jury of adequate mental calibre; trades-people's, by a jury also in trades, and women's — above all things have the differences of women adjusted by juries
of women. The more I pondered the more inefficient to my mind seemed the present service, the more farcical the idea of turning over to a group of such conglomerate and insufficient mentality, questions of serious import for adjustment. I began to fear that after all, Law and Justice were not the Siamese twins that I had always believed them. At the end of the term, we of the jury of peers received our pay. This seemed to me another bit of farce comedy. If working men are taken from their bread-winning to serve the State, why not pay them, what they lose by absence from their labors, or else pay them nothing at all? I received five dollars for several weeks' toil, with nothing for the exhaustion of nerve tissue, and the shattering of ideals. I said to the young man from Harlem, "Come to Del's and blow it in for a dinner." We had a nice little dinner and the bill was eight dollars and a half, and I was glad of it, because it emphasized the humiliation. I now regard jury summons with more intelligent disapproval than ever. I remem ber hearing of an old man who, while watch ing his house burning, turned to the crowd and said, " Really someone ought to brace up and do something." And so in regard to the present jury system, I say, from my very finite and extremely lay point of view, "Oh, gentlemen of the most learned and brilliant and most exhaustive profession on earth, really some of you ought to brace up and do something!" Bru.MMEL.
