Nor were these the only
safeguards. For in the case of very rich men, to whom justice might not
be done on account of the natural envy of their poorer fellow-citizens,
it was arranged that the jury should consist only of rich men. In this
way it was absolutely certain that a complete impartiality would reign.
We shall never see those days again," he concluded.
"But do you not think," I said before I left him, "that the social
perfection of the kind you have described must rather have been due to
some spirit of the time than to particular institutions? For after all
the zealous love of justice and the sense of duty which you describe are
not social elements to be produced by laws."
"Possibly," he said, wearily, "possibly, but we shall never see it
again!"
And I left him looking into the fire with infinite sadness and
reflecting upon his lost youth and the year 1909: a pathetic figure, and
one whose upkeep during the period of his deficiency was a very serious
drain upon the resources of his family.
The Inheritance of Humour
There are some truths which seem to get old almost as soon as they are
born, and that simply because they are so astonishingly true that people
soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and
such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last
five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect
commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities.
Pages:
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56