spacious traditions of Lord Mansfield were fresh in men's minds. The Court made small work of all this humming and hawing about technicalities. Common decency required that such an offence should be put a stop to-they appealed again to the code of good manners which should govern men's actions, their nature revolted at such practices, and they refused to allow it to be discussed, "lest that alone should convey to the public an idea that they entertained a doubt respecting the crime alleged."

In such style, on right occasion, did the Judges of old burst through the straits of law into the open sea of justice. They understood that it was a law of Nature that freedom should slowly broaden down from precedent to precedent, and they supplied the necessary precedents. Their instinct discerned that law must stand four-square with decency, morality, and the good of the people, whatever the letter of it spelt, or else it must fail in its purpose. When one reads these bold decisions, one must admire their downright English simplicity of thought and purpose, and recognise that it has always been that capacity for honest thinking and right action that has kept the Judges of our country respected in the land, in spite of the wild absurdity of much of the law they have to administer. This must have been the meaning of Lord Russell of Killowen when he reminded an old circuit friend who was beginning his career as a Judge of the County Court, "that it was better to be strong and wrong than weak and right."

The idea is perhaps ex

pressed with more finesse in the already famous paradox of Lord Reading, when he told the American Bar, "The idea that it is the duty of the Law Courts to dispense law

is becoming obsolete. It is recognised that the true duty of the Courts is to dispense justice."

But while we turn over the worn yellow pages of the old law reports and smile at the solemn pribbles and prabbles of Indictment points, do not let us forget that a hundred years hence hence many of our legal decisions will appear just as childish to our great-grandchildren as these are to us. I could match some of the narrowest Indictment decisions with specimens of reported cases under the Workmen's Compensation Act. For the true type of judicial mind will always prefer to chew the words of a statute rather than to breathe the spirit of it. We inherit that frame of mind, I suppose, from our priestly ancestors who, as Charles Lamb reminds us, loved to defend or oppugn such Theses Quaedam Theologicae as "Whether the Archangel Uriel could knowingly affirm an untruth, and whether if he could he would."

And for my part I confess to a love of the old days, and have a reverent affection for all these absurd traditional formalities. I do not like to see the legal furniture of our forefathers broken up and thrown on the scrap heap.

"Wherever I turn my head

There's a mildew and a mould;
The sun's going out over-head
And I'm very old."

And so I suppose it is the Old Adam in me that rebels against such trifling official pamphlets as "Indictments Act, 1915," and I look back on the age of Cottingham as a golden age, and even have dreams of regret for the far-gone past when Court-hand and Latin were the

letters and language of our law. One dreads these legal reforms coming like a thief in the night and removing our ancient landmarks. One feels, to use a modern figure, that the great legal omnibus is side-slipping into Chaos.

For if Indictments are to be ruthlessly pruned in this way, where are we to stop? What is to prevent some high-brow legal reformer seizing a big blue pencil and striking out as embarrassing and irrelevant great chunks of the muddy verbosity that we call Rules of Court and throwing big lumps of the practice books to the rag merchant?

When I first read the Indictments Act fresh from the King's printer's press I shuddered at its iconoclasm, but as I read I smiled and took heart of grace. For when I reached Section 9 I found that "This Act shall come into operation on the first day of April." There was a hopeful consonance about that date. Were there jesters abroad in high places? Was I perchance dreaming, and were these official pages mere simulacra and no real statute at all? I was half convinced that when the clock struck twelve on the first day of April I should find the good old Indictment secure in its ancient supremacy and the mocking words "April Fool! " ringing in my long

ears.

But alas! the thing was only too true. The hour struck, but the bell knolled for the passing of the Indictment. Let us hope that the news of it has not carried. across the Styx and that the shades of Foard and Cottingham are untroubled by the shame of it.

Chapter VI Concerning the Psychology

of Perjury

'HAT is truth?" asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate is not the only stipendiary who has had the same question haunting his thoughts as he listens to socalled evidence. We seek to make every trial an inquest of truth, but owing to human naughtiness, faulty machinery, carelessness, and selfishness we have not as yet perfected in our courts the noble art of arriving at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The English-speaking races have always worshipped truth and based their power on national veracity. Alfred the Great was known to the Normans as "the truth speaker." George Washington, who "did it with his little hatchet," could not tell a lie, though, as Mark Twain asserted with some show of reason, his was the superior moral attitude, since he could lie readily, but refrained from doing so.

Yet, in spite of our national truthful habit and a general desire in the community to give true evidence, those who visit our courts come away with an uneasy idea. that there is a great deal of perjury committed at almost every trial. Yet if in a future age the history of our times

is written by a professor who bases his work solely upon official statistics he will pronounce our generation to be scrupulously truthful and free from the crime of perjury. Look, he will say, at multitudinous legal proceedings taking place in Police Courts, County Courts, High Courts, and before arbitrators, consider the number of affidavits made in one year, and then turn to the Criminal Statistics of 1920, and you will find that only forty-five citizens were convicted of perjury. What a splendid record of veracity! How scrupulous and careful must these people have been in giving their testimony in the law courts! How greatly devoted was this pious generation to the pursuit of truth!

Nor would our professor be so hopelessly wrong in his verdict. The martyr of the witness-box often honestly intends to sacrifice himself on the altar of truth and finds to his dismay that he has made a pickle-herring farce of the business. Truth, after all, is a very vague and abstract affair, and the man in the street would find it hard to answer Pilate with an apt definition. On the other hand, most of us could define a lie. The schoolboy who set down that a lie was " an abomination in the sight of the Lord, but a very present help in time of trouble," deserved marks of some sort for his wit and impudence; and the philosopher who tells us that "a lie connotes an assertion made with full consciousness of its untruth and in order to mislead " speaks in language that anyone can understand.

This brings us to consider the relationship of the sin of lying to the crime of perjury. Many things are morally wrong which the law does not recognise as crimes. Lying