verdict or decisive judgment to the praetor who had appointed them. Always, however, praetor and judiccs stood towards each other in much the same relation that the judge and jury of our own system hold towards one another; except that they did not sit together and hear cases at the same time, but acted separately. There is a strong disposition, especially with those who are not familiar with the excellence of the civil law, not only to un dervalue the system, but to set up every just rule of right as indigenous to modern times. It seems, indeed, to be the favorite effort of juridical writers to establish for their own age a system of independent in stitutions, reaching far back into antiquity. The mind which revolts from the recognition of hereditary honors in a family, loves to linger on the feeblest evidences of a coun try's ancient establishments. Such anti quarian partiality has been eminently exhib ited in researches upon the common law of England. Men have explored every region of fancy to furnish it an independent exist ence; and in the United States we freely admit that our only hope of a name and praise in the world, politically speaking, is derived from an attachment to those old British monuments of liberty, trial by jury, the habeas corpus, freedom of speech, and liberty of the press. But a sober investigation of the civil law evinces the identity of many of its principles with those of the common law. The con nection of the histories of Rome, Germany and England prove that the common law is, generally speaking, but a set of laws and customs engrafted upon the stock of Ro man jurisprudence. No investigations prove
this more fully than the history of the Ro man courts and their mode of proceeding, and, especially, the trial by jury. Sir James Mackintosh has observed that "governments are not framed after a model, but that all their parts and powers grow out of occasional acts prompted by some urgent expediency or some private interest, which, in the course of time, coalesce and harden into usages, and that this bundle of usages is the object of respect, and the guide of conduct long before it is embodied, defined and enforced in written laws." It has been said to be the great and final object of government to get twelve impartial and in telligent men into the jury-box; by which, of course, is meant that the administration of equal rights between man and man is the primary object of civilized and social life. Haley declares, " the wisdom of man hath not devised a happier institution than that of juries, or one founded in a juster knowledge of human capacity." In despite of the mist that may surround the origin and development of this " buttress of liberty" as Chatham called it, this "mud sill" of constitutional liberty and broad foun dation of personal rights; and despite the contention that its institution is valued rather as a protection against governmental en croachment on private rights than as an instrument for- performing in the most effi cient manner the intellectual process in volved in the judicial administration of law, we all must concur in the hope expressed by Mr. Hallam: " From this principle may we never swerve, may we never be com pelled in wish to swerve, by a contempt of their oaths in jurors, a disregard of the just limits of their trusts."
