The other day, while I was meditating on morality and Mr. H. Pitt, I
was, so to speak, snatched up and put into a jury box to try people.
The snatching took some weeks, but to me it seemed something sudden and
arbitrary. I was put into this box because I lived in Battersea, and
my name began with a C. Looking round me, I saw that there were also
summoned and in attendance in the court whole crowds and processions of
men, all of whom lived in Battersea, and all of whose names began with a
C.
It seems that they always summon jurymen in this sweeping alphabetical
way. At one official blow, so to speak, Battersea is denuded of all its
C’s, and left to get on as best it can with the rest of the alphabet. A
Cumberpatch is missing from one street--a Chizzolpop from another--three
Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children are crying out
for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is weeping
for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with a
rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race,
the C’s of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally
inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his
second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly
try the case between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the
bar, neither of whom has put in an appearance as yet.
.....
Just when I was wondering whether the King and the prisoner were,
perhaps, coming to an amicable understanding in some adjoining public
house, the prisoner’s head appears above the barrier of the dock; he
is accused of stealing bicycles, and he is the living image of a great
friend of mine. We go into the matter of the stealing of the bicycles.
We do well and truly try the case between the King and the prisoner in
the affair of the bicycles. And we come to the conclusion, after a brief
but reasonable discussion, that the King is not in any way implicated.
Then we pass on to a woman who neglected her children, and who looks as
if somebody or something had neglected her. And I am one of those who
fancy that something had.
All the time that the eye took in these light appearances and the brain
passed these light criticisms, there was in the heart a barbaric pity
and fear which men have never been able to utter from the beginning, but
which is the power behind half the poems of the world. The mood cannot
even adequately be suggested, except faintly by this statement that
tragedy is the highest expression of the infinite value of human
life. Never had I stood so close to pain; and never so far away from
pessimism. Ordinarily, I should not have spoken of these dark emotions
at all, for speech about them is too difficult; but I mention them now
for a specific and particular reason to the statement of which I will
proceed at once. I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of
them there came a curious realisation of a political or social truth. I
saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what a jury really
is, and why we must never let it go.
The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards
specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers because
they fight better, trained singers because they sing better, trained
dancers because they dance better, specially instructed laughers because
they laugh better, and so on and so on. The principle has been applied
to law and politics by innumerable modern writers. Many Fabians have
insisted that a greater part of our political work should be performed
by experts. Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should
be altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.
.....
Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable, I do
not know that there would be any fault to find with this. But the true
result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is
this. That the four or five things that it is most practically essential
that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That
is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths,
yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming
verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance, is the unimpeachable
platitude that the man who finds most pleasure for himself is often the
man who least hunts for it. Another is the paradox of courage; the fact
that the way to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful cliff
above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness. Whoever will
lose his life, the same shall save it; an entirely practical and prosaic
statement.
Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught to every
infant prattling at his mother’s knee is the following: That the more a
man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns
a thing the less he knows it. The Fabian argument of the expert,
that the man who is trained should be the man who is trusted would be
absolutely unanswerable if it were really true that a man who studied
a thing and practiced it every day went on seeing more and more of its
significance. But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its
significance. In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we
are continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility, seeing
less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.
.....
Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of
men. But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can to
other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun. And
the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all
judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen, is not
that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid
(several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got
used to it.
Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is
the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of
judgment; they only see their own workshop. Therefore, the instinct
of Christian civilisation has most wisely declared that into their
judgments there shall upon every occasion be infused fresh blood and
fresh thoughts from the streets. Men shall come in who can see the court
and the crowd, and coarse faces of the policeman and the professional
criminals, the wasted faces of the wastrels, the unreal faces of the
gesticulating counsel, and see it all as one sees a new picture or a
play hitherto unvisited.
Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining
the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to
trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who
know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt
in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system
discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up specialists. But when
it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of
the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember
right, by the Founder of Christianity.