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

66

"W

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

is one of these. There is no law against mere lying as such. Indeed, a lie may cause damage to someone who believes it and yet give to the injured person no right of action. Even after a man has taken an oath in the witnessbox and tells a lie in giving his evidence he does not necessarily commit the crime of perjury. To commit perjury is not such a simple business as a man may think. There are very many liars in the land who never attain to the dignity of real perjury.

Hallam tells us that the Middle Ages were a terrible period for perjury and thinks that trial by combat was continued as being a more likely method of ascertaining truth than judicial litigation with lying witnesses. Considering the prevalence of perjury in those ages, it is the more curious that at Common Law it does not seem originally to have been an indictable offence. The evolution of the crime in our legal history is of considerable interest. The Star Chamber started punishing perjurers in the time of Henry VII, but it was not until the reign of Elizabeth that it was made a statutory offence. Our Anglo-Saxon ancestors and many succeeding generations relied wholly on the sanctity of the oath as a guarantee of truthful evidence. The gist of a legal oath is that the swearer calls upon the Almighty to inflict punishment upon him if he is false to his oath. Once a witness had kissed the Book it was hardly conceivable to our pious forbears that he would risk his immortal soul by telling a lie. If he did, it probably seemed to them wanting in piety to take the matter out of the divine jurisdiction by administering earthly penalties. Robert, King of France, perceiving how frequently men forswore themselves upon

the relics of the saints and thinking less of perjury than sacrilege, caused an empty reliquary of crystal to be used that those who kissed it might incur less guilt in fact though not in intention.

But as time wore on practical experience convinced the rulers of the people that courts of justice were frequented by hard swearers to whom the sanction of divine vengeance was too remote a peril to influence their testimony, but whose minds and behaviour would probably be more directly affected by the pillory and the whipping-post, which, standing opposite the Court-house, had the salutary effect of concentrating the thoughts of the reckless upon the disadvantages of dishonest testimony.

With that love of compromise which is the characteristic of all our legislators we have retained the religious sanction of the oath whilst at the same time we have strengthened the hands of the magistrates in the punishment of perjury. It is strange to-day to read in our decisions upon matters relating to the acceptance of evidence upon oath of the pious efforts of the devout to shut out the testimony of citizens on account of their religious views. George Fox, Margaret Fell, and, in recent years, Charles Bradlaugh, were persecuted and refused justice in the sacred name of religion. To-day we reap the reward of their courage and honesty in a saner series of statutes relating to oaths and evidence. One cannot blame the judges for yielding in these matters to popular bigotry, for they had to administer the bigotry of the law. As late as 1863, when Mrs. Maden in a Lancashire County Court was not allowed to give