Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/342

 in decent families learn to answer plain questions some years before they learn to swear, and material evidence is often lost by the child not having been taught beforehand the proper answers to make when questioned as to the nature of an oath. I heard of a case only lately, which was expected to lead to a committal on a charge of murder, and where an important point rested on the evidence of a young lad who was, to all appearance, truthful, but who did not satisfy the bench that he understood the nature of an oath. Those in whom the ceremony of swearing a child arouses the feeling of physical repugnance that it does in myself, may learn with interest a fact as yet little known in England, and which sufficiently justifies my bringing forward the subject. Hearing that there was something to be learned from Germany, I applied to the eminent jurist, Dr. Gneist, of Berlin, and hear from him that under the new German rules of procedure, which are expected shortly to come into force, the evidence of children under sixteen may be received without oath, at the discretion of the judge. In these days there is a simple rule which an Englishman will do well to act up to, and that is, "Don't be beaten by a German!" Let us live in the heartiest fellowship with the Germans, and never let them get ahead of us if we can help it. In this matter of children's legal evidence, they are fairly leaving us behind, by introducing a plan which is at once more humane and more effective than ours.

If, now, looking at the subject as one of practical sociology, we consider what place the legal oath has filled in savage, barbaric, and civilized life, we must adjudge to it altogether higher value than to the ordeal. At certain stages of culture it has been one of the great forces of society. There was a time when Lycurgus could tell the men of Athens that the oath was the very bond that held the democracy together. There was a time when, as Montesquieu insists, an oath was so binding on the minds of the Romans, that for its observance they would do more than even patriotism or love of glory could draw them to. In our own day, its practical binding power is unmistakable over the consciences of a numerous intermediate class of witnesses, those who are neither truthful nor quite reckless, who are without the honesty which makes a good man's oath superfluous, who will indeed lie solemnly and circumstantially, but are somewhat restrained from perjury by the fear of being, as the old English saying has it, "once forsworn, ever forlorn." Though the hold thus given is far weaker than is popularly fancied, it has from time to time led