Sydney Smith mentions as one of the injustices to the prisoner his inability to give evidence. This remained a disability until our own time and was only removed with great difficulty and against the advice of many learned lawyers. The folklore of the subject is quite entertaining. Our ancestors considered, from introspective knowledge of themselves and their neighbours, that no one with any interest in a dispute was likely to speak the truth about it, they therefore did not allow the parties to a suit to give any evidence at all. This was the old law in both civil and criminal cases. Thus you may remember that in the great case of _Bardell_ v. _Pickwick_ neither plaintiff nor defendant gives evidence, because in law at that date they were not competent witnesses. The inconveniences of this in civil matters was patent to everyone but the lawyers. Writing on the incompetency of witnesses to give evidence, Bentham said with some humour, "in the bosom of his family the lawyer by the force of good sense returns to the simple method from which he is led astray at the bar by the folly of his learning. No one is so deeply tainted with his judicial practice as to apply its rules to his domestic affairs. If you would represent madness--but a madness where all is melancholy and unintelligible--you have only to imagine an English barrister carrying into ordinary life the fictions, the rules, and the logic of the bar." Certainly we cannot believe that when Sergeant Snubbin returned to his house and found a dispute raging between his cook and his butler that he tried to find out the truth about it without hearing what either of them had to say. In 1846 when County Courts were established, the parties and their wives were allowed to give evidence, and so obvious were the advantages of this that in 1851 Lord Brougham passed the Evidence Amendment Act extending the system to other Courts. The only thing that surprises us to-day is that there could ever have been any question about the necessity of allowing parties to give evidence if it was really desired that they should have justice. But we still clung to the right of the prisoner to keep his mouth shut, and in our insular way boasted of his privilege. Thackeray is horrified by the examination of the prisoner in the ordinary French way. "In England, thank heaven, the law is more wise and merciful!" He sees in the French Government advocate an official seeking in every way to draw confessions from the prisoner to perplex and confound him and to do away with any effect that his testimony might have on the jury, and he thanks heaven openly that we should "never have acted as these Frenchmen have done." What really troubled Thackeray's patriotic mind was the indecency of asking the prisoner any question at all. Victorian Englishmen of all grades were peculiarly proud of our criminal administration of justice and considered the privilege of the prisoner to keep his mouth shut was the keystone of the edifice.