The Twelve Men - Page 2

all, for speech about them is too difficult;
but I mention them now for a specific and particular
reason to the statement of which I will proceed at once.
I speak these feelings because out of the furnace of them there
came a curious realisation of a political or social truth.
I saw with a queer and indescribable kind of clearness what
a jury really is, and why we must never let it go.

The trend of our epoch up to this time has been consistently towards
specialism and professionalism. We tend to have trained soldiers
because they fight better, trained singers because they sing better,
trained dancers because they dance better, specially instructed
laughers because they laugh better, and so on and so on.
The principle has been applied to law and politics by innumerable
modern writers. Many Fabians have insisted that a greater
part of our political work should be performed by experts.
Many legalists have declared that the untrained jury should be
altogether supplanted by the trained Judge.

. . . . .

Now, if this world of ours were really what is called reasonable,
I do not know that there would be any fault to find with this.
But the true result of all experience and the true foundation
of all religion is this. That the four or five things
that it is most practically essential that a man should know,
are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to say,
that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths,
yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty
of seeming verbal contradictions. One of them, for instance,
is the unimpeachable platitude that the man who finds most
pleasure for himself is often the man who least hunts for it.
Another is the paradox of courage; the fact that the way
to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful
cliff above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness.
Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it;
an entirely practical and prosaic statement.

Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught
to every infant prattling at his mother's knee is the following:
That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it,
and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it.
The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained
should be the man who is trusted would be absolutely unanswerable
if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced
it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance.
But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.
In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are
continually goading ourselves into gratitude and