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JURIES OF ILLITERATES ATRIAL now in progress illustrates the absurdity of following out to their logical conclusion the stricter rules that have grown up in connection with jury trials. If the jury system is not to perish altogether, a result which some writers have predicted to be inevitable in consequence of its defects, it is to be kept alive not by uncompromising adherence to rules that have outlived their usefulness, but by intelligent inter pretation of the purpose of those rules and liberal construction of their letter and spirit. Were the rule that any juror is incom petent who has read anything whatever in the public press regarding the cir cumstances of an important case to be interpreted in its narrower and more rigorous sense, the outcome would be simply that in a short time no case of great public interest could be tried by anything but a jury composed entirely of illiterates. The doctrine to which lawyers have always been accustomed is that of the necessity of the jury being influenced by nothing whatever except the evidence adduced in the trial, in arriving at its verdict with regard to the facts in dispute. Are we to con strue this principle so narrow-mindedly as to deem it necessary to place upon our juries none but men who, the more ignorant and stupid they are and in different to the world's happenings, the
better fitted they are to perform the function of a most vital part of the mechanism of justice? Or are we, on the other hand, to consider that men of sound and alert faculties, accustomed to watch contemporary affairs with a live interest, are the most competent to reach a dispassionate judgment with re gard to any debatable facts, and are the less likely to be swayed by considera tions prejudicial to the just settlement of a controversy? Perhaps in time some such rule as this could be established, a rule seemingly in harmony with the ends for which the jury system exists. A juror who has read anything bearing upon the facts of a controversy is not thereby disqualified, unless the matter brought to his attention is such as might have led a reasonable man to form a prejudice not easily to be overcome. There would most surely be serious practical obstacles to the adoption of a rule like this, but it will perhaps serve to illustrate in a general way the sort of thing to be de sired some day. We need for our juries not so much men who simply by accident have never come under the influence of a prejudicial view of facts in dispute, but rather men of the type that could resist that influ ence and view any question fairmindedly. As we conceive it, the con stitutional phrase "an impartial jury" does not signify an ignorant jury, nor a jury devoid of the power to grasp the common-sense distinction between evi
