Now I come to the last substitute for the proposed bill,—­the spirit of juries operating their own jurisdiction.  This I confess I think the worst of all, for the same reasons on which I objected to the others,—­and for other weighty reasons besides, which are separate and distinct.  First, because juries, being taken at random out of a mass of men infinitely large, must be of characters as various as the body they arise from is large in its extent.  If the judges differ in their complexions, much more will a jury.  A timid jury will give way to an awful judge delivering oracularly the law, and charging them on their oaths, and putting it home to their consciences to beware of judging, where the law had given them no competence.  We know that they will do so, they have done so in an hundred instances.  A respectable member of your own House, no vulgar man, tells you, that, on the authority of a judge, he found a man guilty in whom at the same time he could find no guilt.  But supposing them full of knowledge and full of manly confidence in themselves, how will their knowledge or their confidence inform or inspirit others?  They give no reason for their verdict, they can but condemn or acquit; and no man can tell the motives on which they have acquitted or condemned.  So that this hope of the power of juries to assert their own jurisdiction must be a principle blind, as being without reason, and as changeable as the complexion of men and the temper of the times.

But, after all, is it fit that this dishonorable contention between the court and juries should subsist any longer?  On what principle is it that a jury [juror?] refuses to be directed by the court as to his competence?  Whether a libel or no libel be a question of law or of fact may be doubtful; but a question of jurisdiction and competence is certainly a question of law:  on this the court ought undoubtedly to judge, and to judge solely and exclusively.  If they judge wrong from excusable error, you ought to correct it, as to-day it is proposed, by an explanatory bill,—­or if by corruption, by bill of penalties declaratory, and by punishment.  What does a juror say to a judge, when he refuses his opinion upon a question of judicature?  “You are so corrupt, that I should consider myself a partaker of your crime, were I to be guided by your opinion”; or, “You are so grossly ignorant, that I, fresh from my hounds, from my plough, my counter, or my loom, am fit to direct you in your own profession.”  This is an unfitting, it is a dangerous state of things.  The spirit of any sort of men is not a fit rule for deciding on the bounds of their jurisdiction:  first, because it is different in different men, and even different in the same at different times, and can never become the proper directing line of law; next, because it is not reason, but feeling, and, when once it is irritated, it is not apt to confine itself within its proper limits.  If it becomes not difference