Juries reach not so much definite conclusions as verdicts, in a curious fashion and for curious reasons.  Very often a jury will have concluded little so far as its individual members are concerned and yet it will have reached a verdict.  The matter of time, as all lawyers know, plays a part in this.  Juries, speaking of the members collectively and frequently individually, object to the amount of time it takes to decide a case.  They do not enjoy sitting and deliberating over a problem unless it is tremendously fascinating.  The ramifications or the mystery of a syllogism can become a weariness and a bore.  The jury-room itself may and frequently does become a dull agony.

On the other hand, no jury contemplates a disagreement with any degree of satisfaction.  There is something so inherently constructive in the human mind that to leave a problem unsolved is plain misery.  It haunts the average individual like any other important task left unfinished.  Men in a jury-room, like those scientifically demonstrated atoms of a crystal which scientists and philosophers love to speculate upon, like finally to arrange themselves into an orderly and artistic whole, to present a compact, intellectual front, to be whatever they have set out to be, properly and rightly—­a compact, sensible jury.  One sees this same instinct magnificently displayed in every other phase of nature—­in the drifting of sea-wood to the Sargasso Sea, in the geometric interrelation of air-bubbles on the surface of still water, in the marvelous unreasoned architecture of so many insects and atomic forms which make up the substance and the texture of this world.  It would seem as though the physical substance of life—­this apparition of form which the eye detects and calls real were shot through with some vast subtlety that loves order, that is order.  The atoms of our so-called being, in spite of our so-called reason—­the dreams of a mood—­know where to go and what to do.  They represent an order, a wisdom, a willing that is not of us.  They build orderly in spite of us.  So the subconscious spirit of a jury.  At the same time, one does not forget the strange hypnotic effect of one personality on another, the varying effects of varying types on each other, until a solution—­to use the word in its purely chemical sense—­is reached.  In a jury-room the thought or determination of one or two or three men, if it be definite enough, is likely to pervade the whole room and conquer the reason or the opposition of the majority.  One man “standing out” for the definite thought that is in him is apt to become either the triumphant leader of a pliant mass or the brutally battered target of a flaming, concentrated intellectual fire.  Men despise dull opposition that is without reason.  In a jury-room, of all places, a man is expected to give a reason for the faith that is in him—­if one is demanded.  It will not do to say, “I cannot agree.”  Jurors have been known to fight.  Bitter antagonisms lasting for years have been generated in these close quarters.  Recalcitrant jurors have been hounded commercially in their local spheres for their unreasoned oppositions or conclusions.