***

Mr. Riker, Recorder of New York, told me: In the State of Pennsylvania it is a principle that the guilty man in a criminal case pays the costs. It is, in my opinion, a salutary principle, but we have not introduced it here. With us it is an axiom that he who pays with his body owes no more to justice.

In Connecticut there is no State Attorney properly so called, but each county has an official who fulfils his duties. [entry cont. Oct. 13]

In the United States, then, the execution of a fine prison seems as important as the pyramid of Cheops, neither more nor less. And consequently, we, who pass in some sort as the penitentiary system made man, when they place us alongside, we appear like giants. You well understand that, for the French government to have charged us to visit the prisons, it is necessary that we be men of the first flight, for what is there greater than a prison? If we were to say to these poor people that there are not a hundred persons in France who know just what the penitentiary system is, and that the French government is so far innocent of the large views imputed to it that as the present hour it probably doesn't even know that it has commissioners in America, they would be utterly astonished, no question.

But you appreciate that the truth consists in not saying what is false, and not in saying all that is true. ...

- [written] Oct. 10, 1831

From this point of view the jury is an eminently republican institution (democratic or aristocratic depending on the class from which the jurors are chosen). All governments which, in practice if not in theory, are not based on the sovereignty of the people, have been obliged to destroy the jury, or to modify it in such a way that it no longer represents public opinion.

That is, notably, what Bonaparte did.

One reason why the Restoration in France fell, is that it did not dare to base itself either on the ancient principle of divine right, or on the dogma of the sovereignty of the people, but tried to make two opposing elements pull in harness. In 1828 for instance, when M. de Peyronnet made the choice of jurors entirely dependent on lot, he probably did not doubt but that he was helping us to take a great step forward towards a republic. But what men most lack is to know how to take a decided line. They are never either good enough or bad enough, sincere enough or crafty enough, sufficiently disinterested or sufficiently selfish; they want to combine all these things and are overcome by the effort.

(Tocqueville, p. 152)