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7“This single circumstance, then, which is as I have described it, will cause you trouble. But here is another. It is by all means essential that whoever from time to time commits a crime should pay some penalty. For the majority of men are not brought to reason by admonition or by example, but it is absolutely necessary to punish them by disfranchisement, by exile, or by death; and such punishments are often administered in an empire as large as this is and in a population as great as ours, especially during a change of government. 2Now if you appointed other men to judge these wrongdoers, they would vie with each other in acquitting the accused, and particularly all whom you might be thought to hate; for judges, you know, gain an appearance of authority when they act in any way contrary to the wish of the ruler. 3And if an occasional criminal is in fact convicted, it will be thought that he has been condemned deliberately, in order to please you. But if, on the other hand, you sit in judgment yourself, you will be obliged to punish many also of your peers—an unfortunate situation—and you will certainly be thought to be calling some of them to account through resentment rather than through a sense of justice. 4For no one believes that those who have the power to use compulsion are acting honestly when they give judgment, but all men think they are led by a sense of shame to spread out before the truth a mere semblance and illusive picture of a constitutional government, and under the legal name of a court of justice are but satisfying their own desires. This, then, is what happens in monarchies. 5In democracies, on the other hand, when any one is accused of committing a private wrong, he is made defendant in a private suit before a jury of his equals; or, if he is accused of a public crime, in his case also a jury of his peers, men whom the lot shall designate, sits in judgment. It is therefore easier for men to bear the decisions which proceed from such juries, since they think that any penalty dealt out to them has been inflicted neither by a judge’s power nor as a favour which a judge has been forced to grant.
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