Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/108

 reviewer appears to attach an undue or unwarranted authority to what has been termed the evidence of handwriting; and, like Mr. Pitcairn, Lord Dover, and Mr. Patrick Fraser Tytler, to ground his conclusions chiefly upon the assumption of the authenticity of Logan's handwriting. The cases that have come before the English courts show that, as Mr. Justice Coleridge said, in the case of Smyth v. Smyth and others, tried at the Gloucester Assizes in August, 1853, "The identity of handwriting is very much a matter of opinion, and anybody might be deceived in a matter of evidence like that."

It is, indeed, a rule of English law that evidence of handwriting based on the comparison between the handwriting of a party to a document and other documents proved or assumed to be his handwriting, as well as evidence of handwriting by knowledge acquired from specimens, is not receivable. Among the cases collected by Mr. Best, there are two which strikingly show the deceptive