Before commenting too harshly upon this mote in the eye of Italian procedure, it may not be unwise to consider whether any similar beam exists in our own. Certainly there is a deal of interruption, contradiction, and disputation in our own criminal courts which sometimes is not only undignified, but frequently ends in an unseemly dispute between judge and lawyers. Contempt of court is very general in the United States, and we have practically no means for punishing it. Moreover, these scenes in our own courts do not usually assist in getting at the truth. With us, once a witness has spoken and his testimony has become a matter of record, whether he has said what he meant to say or not (under the complicated questions put in examination and cross-examination), or whether or not he has succeeded in giving an accurate impression of what he saw or knows, he is hustled out of the way and made to keep silence. He has little, if any, chance to explain or annotate his testimony. A defendant may go to jail or be turned loose on the community because the witness really didn’t get a chance to tell his own story in his own way. Now, the witness’s own story in precisely his own way is just what they are looking for under the inquisitorial procedure, and if he is misinterpreted they want to know it. The process may take longer, but it makes for getting at the truth, and the Italians regard a criminal trial as of even more importance than do some of our judges, who often seem more anxious to get through a record-breaking calendar and “dispose of” a huge batch of cases than to get at the exact facts in any particular one. There is nothing “hit or miss” about the Continental method. Whatever its shortcomings, whatever its limitations to the cold Anglo-Saxon mind, it brings out all the details and the witness’s reasons. At an Italian trial a witness might testify (and his evidence be considered as important) that he heard sounds of a scuffle and a man’s voice exclaim, “You have stabbed me, Adolfo!” that somebody darted across the street and into an alley, that an old woman whom he identifies in court as the deceased’s mother, and who was standing beside him, cried out, “That is my son’s voice!” and that three or four persons came running up from several different locations, each of whom described, circumstantially and independently, a murder which he had seen perpetrated, identifying the assassin by name. In America it is doubtful whether in most jurisdictions the witness would be permitted to testify to anything except that he heard a scuffle, saw a man run away, and that an old woman and several other people thereupon said _something_.