[71] Mr. Morley in the House of Commons.  Hansard, June 6, 1907, p. 885.

In England itself, though great political inventions are always a glorious possibility, the changes in our political structure which will result from our new knowledge are likely, in our own time, to proceed along lines laid down by slowly acting, and already recognisable tendencies.

A series of laws have, for instance, been passed in the United Kingdom during the last thirty or forty years, each of which had little conscious connection with the rest, but which, when seen as a whole, show that government now tends to regulate, not only the process of ascertaining the decision of the electors, but also the more complex process by which that decision is formed; and that this is done not in the interest of any particular body of opinion, but from a belief in the general utility of right methods of thought, and the possibility of securing them by regulation.

The nature of this change may perhaps be best understood by comparing it with the similar but earlier and far more complete change that has taken place in the conditions under which that decision is formed which is expressed in the verdict of a jury.  Trial by jury was, in its origin, simply a method of ascertaining, from ordinary men whose veracity was secured by religious sanctions, their real opinions on each case.[72] The various ways in which those opinions might have been formed were matters beyond 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.