Monday Quote Frenzy - John Stuart Mill on Jury Duty

Mill is here reflecting on the classical Athenian custom of having all citizens serve both in the ecclesia (the legislative body) and the dicastery (commonly translated as jury, although it was the same group as the ecclesia acting in a judicial mode).

It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men’s ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments… in most cases the individual has no access to any person of cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for the public, supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned to him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man. Notwithstanding the defects of the social system and moral ideas of antiquity, the practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern. … He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good: and he usually finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be to supply reasons to his understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general interest.

This first appeared in Considerations on Representative Government, but was developed further in the first section of Mill’s review of Democracy in America, in the October 1840 Edinburgh Review, and reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions, London, 1859, vol. 2, pp. 1-83.