and customs and lead to breaches of the law.  Other things being equal, a greater degree of freedom leads to more violations of rules and greater resisting power among the poor than a lesser degree of freedom.  It does not necessarily follow that the country is best where the people are the most obedient.  Complete obedience leads to submission, to aggression and to despotism.  Doubtless China has fewer crimes than England.  The power of resistance is so crushed that no one thinks of defying a master, resenting an injury, violating a rule, claiming any personal rights or protesting against caste, age, or privilege.

Always there are certain men who believe that all reform in criminal procedure must come by abolishing juries and submitting every question to a court.  Those who are rich and strong and the lawyers who advocate their interests are mainly arrayed on this side.  The poor and rebellious, with those who naturally or otherwise advocate their cause, stand for the juries as against the courts.  Those who strive to be fair are often misled from a lack of experience and little judgment of human nature.  The public is always against the accused.  The press is against him.  The machinery of the law is against him.  The dice are loaded for his conviction.  Some people have childish faith in the courts.  But judges are neither infinitely wise nor infinitely good; they come from the ranks of lawyers and for the most part from those who have been long engaged in defending property rights; they are generally conservative; they are not independent of public opinion; almost invariably they reflect public opinion, which means the public opinion of the community in which they live.  Few of them have much knowledge of biology, of psychology, of sociology, or even of history.

One curse of our political life comes from the fact that as soon as a man has secured an office, he has his eye on another and his whole effort is to please the people, that is, the people who express themselves the most easily.  Very few judges rise to a great degree of independence or defy popular clamor.  A jury is less bound by public opinion; their responsibility is divided; they are not as a rule seeking office; while swayed by the crowd they are still more independent than judges and with them the common man, the accused, has a better chance.

No doubt judges are abler, better educated, more accustomed to weighing evidence and able to arrive at a more logical conclusion than most juries.  Still none of these qualities necessarily leads to just findings.  Questions of right and wrong are not determined by strict rules of logic.  If public opinion could come to regard the criminal as it does the insane, the imbecile, or the ill, then a judicial determination would be the best.  But as long as crime is regarded as moral delinquency and punishment savors of vengeance, every possible safeguard and protection must be thrown around the accused.  In the settling of opinions and the passing of judgments, mob psychology is all-powerful and really, in the last analysis, every human question comes down to the power of public opinion.