A dead set is being made by the Irish newspaper
Correspondents and by some of the Irish Judges against Lord O'Hagan's Irish Jury Act, but the majority of the failures about which so much fuss is made appear to be due simply to that kind of want of knowledge and want of experience which are inseparable from any first attempt to teach a people the duties of jurymen. 'One man thinks he may go out and take refreshment in the middle of the trial of a felony ; another thinks he should be ,excused, after he has been empanelled, because he is a Govern- ment servant ; and yet a great many of the men who make these `blunders are rated so highly that they would have been just as eligible under the old law as now We do not say the Act does not require amendment ; probably it does ; but we Ao think that a little steady perseverance with it,—a little .education,—would make even this Act work very fairly, and we are sure that no Act which really takes the juries from the people at large, instead of from a small number of professional jurymen, would work easily for some time to come. The duties .of a juryman, simple as they are, have to be learnt.
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