It seems a farce to put a criminal in the position of a witness, and unless he has his wits about him he may have good cause to regret taking advantage of the Act. The evidence of an accused person must, of necessity, be discounted in the mind of the judge, and very properly, too, when it is almost invariably false, or, at best, materially tainted with falsehood. The instinct of self-preservation is strong in every man, however lowly his sphere; accuse a public servant of drunkenness while on duty, and he will, with the aid of his associates, manufacture evidence of his invariable sobriety! It is the same thing with persons accused of crime. Accuse them, and they will fight to escape. That they are guilty is a detail. The Criminal Evidence Act merely gives them an additional crutch on which to lean, _i.e._, the license of personal explanation. That the Act is based on benevolence and a desire to do justice, and for such reasons is worthy of respect, one cannot doubt, but candour compels one to submit, also, that it affords a fertile opportunity for perjury on the part of a criminal, and for an unnecessary waste of time. Since the trial, at the Central Criminal Court, of the murderer, “Stinie” Morrison, or Morris Stein, the Criminal Evidence Act has attracted a good deal of special comment. The bulk of this comment has been directed against that portion of subsection (_b_), section 1, which, where “the nature or conduct of the defence is such as to involve imputations on the character of the prosecutor or the witnesses for the prosecution,” authorises the prosecution to question the accused as to his past crimes, convictions, etc. “Defending counsel may again, as in Rex v. Morrison,” says a legal writer in _The Daily Mail_, “feel it his duty to attack the characters of some of the witnesses for the Crown. At once the prisoner is rendered liable to have his whole dossier--generally a damaging one--laid before the jury. That is an immense step forward to the Continental system, where the judge’s interrogatories always begin with a catechism on the prisoner’s previous crimes.” The same matter has brought some remarks from the law correspondent of _The Pall Mall Gazette_, “If there is to be legislation on the subject, one suggestion may be hazarded. It is that, whatever other amendments in the Criminal Evidence Act experience may demand, an exception from the stringent rule should be made in capital cases. When the penalty is death, admit nothing but ‘the facts’ and exclude bad character from them.”