I do not of course assert that we criminalists need little scholarly
knowledge of law, and ought to depend entirely upon knowledge of men. We
need exactly as much more knowledge as our task exceeds that of the
horse-dealer, but we can not do without knowledge of humanity. The
immense onerousness of the judge’s office lies in just the fact that he
needs so very much more than his bare legal knowledge. He must, before
all things, be a jurist and not merely a criminalist; he must be in full
possession not only of the knowledge he has acquired in his academy, but
of the very latest up-to-date status of his entire science. If he
neglects the purely theoretical, he degenerates into a mere laborer. He
is in duty bound not only to make himself familiar with hundreds of
things, to be able to consort with all sorts of crafts and trades, but
also, finally, to form so much out of the material supplied him by the
law as is possible to human power.
Section 4. (b) Integrity of Witnesses.
One of the criminal judge’s grossest derelictions from duty consists in
his simply throwing the witness the question and in permitting him to
say what he chooses. If he contents himself in that, he leaves to the
witness’s conscience the telling of the truth, and the whole truth; the
witness is, in such a case, certainly responsible for one part of the
untruthful and suppressed, but the responsibility for the other, and
larger part, lies with the judge who has failed to do his best to bring
out the uttermost value of the evidence, indifferently for or against
the prisoner. The work of education is intended for this purpose,--not,
as might be supposed, for training the populace as a whole into good
witnesses, but to make that individual into a good, trustworthy witness
who is called upon to testify for the first, and, perhaps, for the last
time in his life. This training must in each case take two
directions--it must make him _want_ to tell the truth; it must make him
_able_ to tell the truth. The first requirement deals not only with the
lie alone, it deals with the development of complete conscientiousness.
How to face the lie itself can not be determined by means of training,
but conscientious answers under examination can certainly be so
acquired. We are not here considering people to whom truth is an utter
stranger, who are fundamentally liars and whose very existence is a
libel on mankind. We consider here only those people who have been
unaccustomed to speaking the full and unadulterated truth, who have
contented themselves throughout their lives with “approximately,” and
have never had the opportunity of learning the value of veracity. It may
be said that a disturbingly large number of people are given to
wandering, in conversation, and in the reproduction of the past. They do
not go straight, quickly, and openly to the point, they loiter toward
it--“If I do not reach it in a bee line, I can get along on by-paths, if
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