This system, it is assumed, will
ascertain the sense of the whole people "the country" with
sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes, and with as much
accuracy as is practicable without too great inconvenience and
expense.
5. Another objection that will perhaps be made to allowing jurors
to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, is, that the law
would be uncertain.
If, by this objection, it be meant that the law would be uncertain
to the minds of the people at large, so that they would not know
what the juries would sanction and what condemn, and would not
therefore know practically what their own rights and liberties
were under the law, the objection is thoroughly baseless and
false. No system of law that was ever devised could be so entirely
intelligible and certain to the minds of the people at large as
this. Compared with it, the complicated systems of law that are
compounded of the law of nature, of constitutional grants, of
innumerable and incessantly changing legislative enactments, and
of countless and contradictory judicial decisions, with no uniform
principle of reason or justice running through them, are among the
blindest of all the mazes in which unsophisticated minds were ever
bewildered and lost.
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