lO 



offences upon the work of reconstruction of our highways, 

 always carefully seeing to it that the work done by them is 

 beyond and above that which would otherwise be done by 

 free labor. I have not given the subject sufficient thought 

 to advocate this proposition, and I can only say that it has 

 been elsewhere tried with success, both in securing better 

 highways and diminishing a certain class of convicts 

 whose worst punishment is hard work. At least one mem- 

 ber of the board of county commissioners has examined 

 this plan, endorses it, and has unsuccessfully advocated it 

 before different committees of the general court. 



But we may expect to find in the methods of inquiry and 

 trial used by the criminal law, rather than in the methods 

 of punishment, practices which are unduly wasteful and 

 cause expensive delays and miscarriages of justice, and 

 this especially because of the history of the origin of the 

 law and the many rigid rules which have restricted the 

 freedom of its development. 



The great body of our criminal, as of our civil law, was 

 brought across the waters by our forefathers from England 

 aud from that time to the present, the development of its 

 rules has proceeded upon both sides of the water, naturally 

 diverging somewhat, but in the main, today, presenting 

 systems substantially identical. Many, if not most, of the 

 rules governing the administration of criminal justice orig- 

 inated and became fixed at a time when offences were 

 punished with ferocious severity. At the opening of this 

 century in England, offences which would now be deemed 

 almost trivial, were punished by death. Prisoners upon trial 

 were not allowed the l)onefit of counsel, and were not per- 

 mitted to testify in their own behalf. The prosecuting power 

 itself seemed something apart from the people. 



As an offset to these disadvantages, judges and juries 



