Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 139 One of the serious consequences of compelling the court to try all questions of fact as well as law is the danger of thus impairing the confidence of litigants in its impartiality. All understand that the judge does not make, but declares the law; and so has no room for choice or personal bias. But in deciding facts he must necessarily judge and weigh parties and witnesses; and as the most ignorant think that they can decide readily as to facts while they know nothing of law, they assume to revise the judgment of the court; and what seems to them patent error they are apt to attribute to latent prejudice. Another serious objection to the proposed change would be the additional labor imposed on the judiciary. And it is im portant to observe, that it is not simply the amount of added labor that is to be taken into account, but the kind. The investigation of a mass of tangled facts and conflicting testi mony is at once more foreign to the mental habits of the judge, more wearisome, and accompanied with less intellectual satis faction than the solution of questions of law. Besides this, the judge who presides at jury trials must gird up the loins of his mind to decide at once the legal questions that arise; and then his duty is done. The responsibility ends there, and if parties are dissatisfied the question goes to a full court of appeals. But as to questions of fact, the decision of a single judge is final; and how oppressive this sense of responsibility sometimes becomes before a decision is reached, only those who have experienced it can estimate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.