pronounced in our own times, especially by extraordinary tribunals, under circumstances where a just attention to the different considerations arising out of these distinctions, would have led to contrary conclusions. Notwithstanding the blunders juries must occasionally commit, and that the institution has fallen under Mr Bentham's heaviest displeasure; we cannot but suspect that the advantage of this comparison in our favour, is not owing more to the humanity of juries, than to their plain practical familiarity with the business of life. If, as would seem therefore to be true, no rule can be safely given for measuring the degree of relationship between any two facts; it is not likely that much should have been left by nature for science or legislation to accomplish, in framing arbitrary propositions by which our confidence in the human senses, or in the veracity of mankind, must be adjusted. General rules are worse than useless where no two cases can be alike; and where every one, therefore, if really tried, must be tried by its own circumstances, and not by antecedent maxims, however correctly true in some preceding cause. It would be as wise to lay down at Lloyd's positive regulations, obliging every captain, when the wind carried away his jib, to throw over his cargo, or when he was within a certain distance of a rock, to abandon his vessel. A distrust in the testimony of the senses, pretended by some philosophers, is not practically more absurd than a disbelief in the existence of truth, applied to whole classes, even when they may be subject to certain biasses and failings. Yet, it is upon this moral scepticism, equally overwhelmed by universal experience, and without the sophistry of metaphysical education and necessity to excuse it, that the whole theory of exclusive predestination is really bottomed. The average of falsehood in the world (much less of successful falsehood) struck upon an estimate of the innumerable transactions of daily life, would be small indeed, notwithstanding the prevarication of schoolboys, the gossiping hearsay of a provincial town, or the market overt of a cover side or a club-house. The lie is, even in such cases, where it is worth while, soon run down; it is either earthed by being followed up to its original inventor; or by the application of the test of a few sharp interrogatories, it shortly appears in a dark precipitate at the bottom. But among grown up persons, and in serious matters, this is done much more readily and efficiently. For in proportion to the importance of the fact inquired into, the availability of the intrinsic, for the most part, and certainly the exercise of the extrinsic securities will naturally rise.

The securities for truth are intrinsic and extrinsic. The in

trinsic depend for their operation on the personal disposition and qualities of the party, and consist of the following interests; some of which will, more or less, bear upon every narrator of a fact, whether in a coffee-room, or a witness-box. 1. The greater facility and naturalness of telling truth; this assumes the intellectual proposition, that an act of memory is generally a less difficult effort than an act of invention. 2. Character. 3. Religion. 4. Temporal punishment. 5. Moral principle; on whatever state of mind it is supposed to depend, whether conscience, sympathy, love of justice, utility, &c.

The extrinsic securities consist in the precautions which are taken for accuracy in the original observation of facts, and in the subsequent preservation of the evidence respecting them; also in the combination of every possible form and instrument for their complete and correct investigation-publicity, confrontation, examination virâ voce, and cross-examination, with the appropriate use of writing-conducted in the presence of the judge who is to decide upon its effect. These outward arrangements are not only our best guards against any errors of understanding and of accident, but they are the grand specifics for keeping the intrinsic securities sound and active; and our only real protection, that, when the intrinsic securities happen to be endangered by falsehood, the falsehood of the witness shall not pass on, and become the misdecision of the judge. We will merely observe, in passing, a remarkable coincidence of imperfections between the practice of the Court of Chancery in the form of taking evidence, and that of the worst continental systems. Publicity is as yet neglected in the greatest part of Europe-and evidence is taken in private in the Court of Chancery. That evidence should be taken by one judge, and tried by another, is common law half over the continent-so it is the only course pursued by the Court of Chancery. Cross-examination is a word peculiarly English-yet cross-examination is so dangerous in equity to the party who should dare to use it, that a rigid abstinence from it is the first thing taught his pupil by a draughtsman; and it, in fact, can be said to exist almost as little as though it were forbidden by act of Parliament. With all the advantages, in point of form, which a common law examination has over the secret procedure of courts of civil law, what should we say to a complete loss of cross-examination at Nisi Prius?

Such being the general principles, it is evident, that, in order to ascertain in any given case of testimony, the probability of its approximation to truth or falsehood, we must satisfy our

selves, as well as we can, of the force with which these different securities, internal or external, existed, or were employed. The loss or imperfection of any one security does not neutralize the rest. A man, whose invention is more mercurial than his memory is ready or tenacious, may yet be as veracious a man as lives. A, from invincible stupidity, cannot comprehend, or, from a Chillingworth-like vivacity and scrupulousness of ratiocination, argues himself backwards and forwards into or out of, a belief of a future state; yet, in either case, he may love truth well enough to be prepared to die a martyr for what he thinks to be its cause. B has committed a felony, or even perjury, yet he may be reformed; or having stood in the pillory once, he may by possibility not have acquired such a passion for rotten eggs, that, without any other assignable motive, he will commit perjury again to get there. C has an interest in the cause or question; but, from jealousy of reputation, respect to himself, or fear of hell, would rather sweep the streets than stain himself with a single prevarication. Real life could not exist a day, were it universally assumed, that, when you have brought home one motive to a man for truth or falsehood, the business was done. We are carried forward by the sense of pains and pleasures. If you wish to know the amount of the aggregate interests either way, acting on the mind with relation to any given fact, you must count the forces on both sides; the difference is the amount. Leaving out any of the interests, or reckoning the pounds for shillings, and the pence for pounds, you can employ no surer means for being deceived. Bacon calculates that there is no passion so weak, but what has on certain occasions conquered the fear even of death; therefore the species of interest will furnish no conclusive inference respecting its degree. The number of interests just as little; one ruling passion will outvote five weaker ones, or swallow them up if they say a word. Mere tendency is not enough even in physics, or every body would be at the centre.

It is doing nothing in the way of excluding falsehood, but probably a great deal in the way of excluding truth, to select (whether well or ill) some half dozen objections as final, when there must remain behind untouched, an immense mass of motives to restrain or excite mendacity, which no human being can separate and balance, but those before whom the particular case is laid. The scales of justice are trifled with, and not aided, by our imposing on the blindfold goddess, with a putting in and taking out of imaginary weights. When these proportions that apply strictly to the question of veracity are settled, an en

tirely distinct debtor and creditor account must be next gone into the comparison between the risk of prohibiting, and of inconveniences from requiring, any particular sort of evidence.

Scarcely any defect in the mode by which evidence may be extracted can amount to a total destruction of its credit. Still the immense interval, as respects its distinctness, completeness, and correctness, between the two extremes (the worst and the best), cannot, when we look at the practice of most countries, be contemplated without dismay.

Even in the case of honest parties, willing witnesses, fair and wise tribunals, the difference is still of vast importance: in the case of dishonest parties, unwilling witnesses, and doubtful tribunals, the difference will be life or death. The course pursued by the English law in the arrangements that regulate the species of evidence it admits, and the mode of taking it, is occasionally very singular. It is droll that the trust-worthiness of a witness should vary, not on points relating to himself, but on the species of judge before whom he is called, (5. vol. 432.): for example, the Chancellor-King's Bench-Barons of Exchequer. But, as though it were feared the truth should be too much got at, in the instances where the exclusion is taken off the witness, a corresponding clog is put on the form in which the evidence is received.

At common law you shall only hear half the possible evidence, but that half you shall hear in the best manner; in equity, where the examination is taken in the epistolary form, and in all that is brought before judges on affidavits, you shall hear the parties themselves too, (in equity to speak only against, and on affidavits for, themselves); but then the manner must be the worst. In one event, you shall decide upon half the case, that half being thoroughly ascertained; in the other, you shall have a good part of the remainder of the story told, but under circumstances that leave you comparatively without any security that a word of all you have heard is true. Quantity and quality must not be both good at once; that were an ignominy and a pain in'deed.' So they vary inversely; just as a man buying land may choose between a little good in a ring fence, or have the difference in quality made up, in number of acres, lying at a distance, indifferent and uninclosed. It could never have happened, if the subject had been inspected with the eye of reason, as well as that of science, that, instead of so natural a remedy for difficulties in the discovery of truth, as improvements in the mode of investigation, mankind should have imagined the same object might be obtained, by closing up a portion of the pipes through

which information was to be conveyed. To make this proceeding at all plausible, it became necessary to allege that there was some treacherous decomposition or deposit, poisoning the suspected channels.

If it is agreed that the presumptions in favour of truth really rest upon the general securities we have mentioned, such a thing as general disbelief is out of the question: and particular disbelief, to become at any time intelligible, can only be an exception, founded upon one of the three following contingencies: 1. Personal suspicion of the witness; in which case, the result must depend solely on the scrutiny of individual character and circumstance. 2. Special contradiction; which must be determined by a comparison of the opposite testimonies. And, 3. Improbability; which, whether physical or moral, is nothing else, than that there exists a case of supposed general contradiction on the other side. Our present observations must be (as we have said above) restricted to the first objection; and will apply to that, only as far as the imputation is grounded on the inference of total incredibility, from an imputed want of morals. In our preceding reference to the general sanctions for truth, we necessarily anticipated the proper answer to any argument of conclusive incredibility based upon such suspicion. If the strongest of all examples; we mean the case, where the existence of a temptation to violate truth, and also the existence of a corrupt habit of yielding to such temptation, are both proved, is not a sufficient justification of peremptory exclusion, nothing need be said about the minor hazards. For, as courage is all you want on a field of battle, so the only moral quality that can be of the least service in a witness-box is veracity; nor for the purposes of justice, does it at all signify from what motive it is derived. The witness-box is not set apart, like the pulpit, for a special class of persons; nor need human nature be changed by mounting up its steps. It is dangerous to leave hold of just principles, our only clue in the labyrinth of life. That, once done, there is no limit to the point where we may be carried, by the possible application of, or refinement upon, inferences, whose origin is essentially artificial, and in opposition to our ordinary habits and experience. They who begin by subtilizing on a certain quality of witnesses as indispensable to belief, are on the fair road to the mystery of some Pythagorean number; and may reach at last the certainty required by that general council, which provided, that nothing short of the concurrence of twelve witnesses should convict a cardinal of any crime. A little further, and the rule laid down by Scriblerus will be established law (as good as that of crowner's quest), that