When a child, a wife, a servant, a student—any one under personal authority—is accused or suspected an explanation is demanded, and refusal to testify is held, and rightly held, a confession of guilt. To question the accused—rigorously and sharply to examine him on all matters relating to the offense, and even trap him if he seem to be lying—that is Nature’s method of criminal procedure; why in our public trials do we forego its advantages? It may annoy; a person arrested for crime must expect annoyance. It can not make an innocent man, even a mere witness, incriminate himself, but it can make a rogue do so, and therein lies its value. This ancient and efficient safeguard to rascality, the right of a witness to refuse to testify when his testimony would tend to convict him of crime, has been strengthened by a recent decision of the United States Supreme Court. That will probably add another century or two to its mischievous existence, and possibly prove the first act in such an extension of it that eventually a witness can not be compelled to testify at all. In fact it is difficult to see how he can be compelled to now if he has the hardihood to exercise his constitutional right without shame and with an intelligent consciousness of its limitless application. The case in which the Supreme Court made the decision was one in which a witness refused to say whether he had received from a defendant railway company a rate on grain shipments lower than the rate open to all shippers. The trial was in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and Judge Gresham chucked the scoundrel into jail. He naturally applied to the Supreme Court for relief, and that high tribunal gave joy to every known or secret malefactor in the country by deciding—according to law, no doubt—that witnesses in a criminal case can not be compelled to testify to anything that “_might tend_ to criminate them _in any way_, or subject them to _possible_ prosecution.” The italics are my own and indicate about as clearly as extended comment could the boundless immunity that the decision confirms or confers. It is to be hoped that some public-spirited gentleman called to the stand in some celebrated case may point the country’s attention to the state of the law by refusing to tell his name, age or occupation, or answer any question whatever. And it would be a fitting _finale_ to the farce if he would threaten the too curious attorney with an action for damages for compelling a disclosure of character. IV