that nothing else will do.  Accordingly he has bullied his father into giving it to him; and with his awkward manners this ungainly creature presents in it a sufficiently ridiculous figure.  But the dress-coat will some day be too tight for him and incommode him.  It will not be very long before he feels it in trial by jury.  This institution arose in the most barbarous period of the Middle Ages—­the times of Alfred the Great, when the ability to read and write exempted a man from the penalty of death.  It is the worst of all criminal procedures.  Instead of judges, well versed in law and of great experience, who have grown grey in daily unravelling the tricks and wiles of thieves, murderers and rascals of all sorts, and so are well able to get at the bottom of things, it is gossiping tailors and tanners who sit in judgment; it is their coarse, crude, unpractised, and awkward intelligence, incapable of any sustained attention, that is called upon to find out the truth from a tissue of lies and deceit.  All the time, moreover, they are thinking of their cloth and their leather, and longing to be at home; and they have absolutely no clear notion at all of the distinction between probability and certainty.  It is with this sort of a calculus of probabilities in their stupid heads that they confidently undertake to seal a man’s doom.

[Footnote 1:  Translator’s Note.—­It may be well to explain that “Michel” is sometimes used by the Germans as a nickname of their nation, corresponding to “John Bull” as a nickname of the English.  Fluegel in his German-English Dictionary declares that der deutsche Michel represents the German nation as an honest, blunt, unsuspicious fellow, who easily allows himself to be imposed upon, even, he adds, with a touch of patriotism, “by those who are greatly his inferiors in point of strength and real worth.”]

The same remark is applicable to them which Dr. Johnson made of a court-martial in which he had little confidence, summoned to decide a very important case.  He said that perhaps there was not a member of it who, in the whole course of his life, had ever spent an hour by himself in balancing probabilities.[1] Can any one imagine that the tailor and the tanner would be impartial judges?  What! the vicious multitude impartial! as if partiality were not ten times more to be feared from men of the same class as the accused than from judges who knew nothing of him personally, lived in another sphere altogether, were irremovable, and conscious of the dignity of their office.  But to let a jury decide on crimes against the State and its head, or on misdemeanours of the press, is in a very real sense to set the fox to keep the geese.

[Footnote 1:  Boswell’s Johnson, 1780, set. 71.]