THE SPREAD OF PERJURY.
OF all eases tried in London in recent years, the " Con- spiracy Case" of last week, otherwise the indictment of Edward Lawrence Levy for subornation of perjury, is, we think, the most depressing. That a quondam solicitor of indifferent repute, long since struck off the rolls, should live by "getting up " unreal cases, educating witnesses, or
improving affidavits, is, no doubt, nothing new. Old habituds of the Courts tell stories of numbers of such men— a whole class of them once hung abdut the old Palace Court— and satirists like Dickens were never tired of holding them up to public contempt, or endeavouring, as he did in his portrait of Jaggers, to account for their impunity. Old lawyers are very slow to believe affidavits, and there once was, if there is not now, a regular trade in evidence of alibi. Nor was the accused, Levy, exceptionally clever. His agents had risen to the conception of teaching witnesses from an imaginary plan, so that they should not contradict each other as to localities ; but Hindoo lawyers have for ages adopted much subtler devices than that. An English Judge in Bengal, who suspected fraud in a murder case, once fancied that ho had a chance of playing the part of Solomon. Four eye-witnesses were examined apart, and one of them swore to a deep shadow thrown by a neighbouring tree across the victim's face, so rendering recognition at a certain dis- tance difficult. The Judge, who was convinced that the case had been got up, thought he saw his way, and asked each witness separately the direction of the shadow, and the name of the tree. They all, however, told him precisely the same story, with faint differences, due to the positions at which they had been standing, till he was hopelessly puzzled. That they should all agree was natural, but that they should all differ slightly, and differ as they ought to have differed, was, on the theory of fraud, inexplicable. It turned out subsequently, hi time to save the life of the accused, that the prosecuting attorney had had the whole scene acted in the place selected, and the witnesses had nothing to do but to keep their eyes open and describe the pseudo-truth, and contradiction be- came impossible. The Levy device was gross compared with that, and the horrible feature of the case does not, to our minds, lie there, but in the ease with which the conspirators suborned witnesses. Apparently, Levy's agents picked up casual acquaintances, promised them a sovereign if the case was won and ten shillings if they lost, and without the smallest trouble induced them to swear that they had seen a cart acci- dent for which damages were claimed. They themselves all confessed the facts, and declared in so many words that their evidence was " a pack of lies," while one of them, who had signed his "proofs," but shrank from the witness-box, admitted by silence, when questioned by Mr. Justice Hawkins, that his reluctance arose entirely from fear of an indictment for perjury. Another, who also failed to appear at the trial, said, in cross-examination, in the coolest way, " He did not know at the time what the men to whom he had referred were wanted for ; but if he had known at the time that- they were wanted to commit perjury, he should have done it. He did not think about what they were wanted for, or whether what they said was true or false. If he had not found out before, very likely he should have gone down to Guildford and committed perjury as the others did." These latter were, of course, perjurers only in intention ; but there were others who did perjure themselves, and but for accidental circumstances, they might never have been detected.
Such cases are, in the opinion of experienced men, growing frightfully frequent. They assert that while the habit of truth probably is not diminishing, or is oven slightly increas- ing in England, especially among women, with the progress of education, there is a distinct falling-off in the old awe of the witness-box, the old reluctance which even bad men felt to commit legal perjury. They attribute it, we believe—or at least our informants did—to the decay of the old fear of Hell, —and that, no doubt, is an operative cause ; but there is also another, the decay, as education advances, of the half- superstitious dread of the Law. The lower class have learned to know that punishment for Perjury is both rare and difficult, and the tonic influence which the
fear of punishment exerts has ceased to operate. If this is correct, and it agrees not only with the evidence in this case, but with the long-observed fact that among the Northern races much of the active conscience is generated by positive law, we would earnestly ask our real law-makers—men like Lord Selborne and Lord Cairns, who recently passed the. Married Women's Property Act merely by agreeing—whether it is not a pressing duty on their consciences to simplify and strengthen the law of perjury 'I We do not venture even to suggest to them how it should be done. They under- stand the existing procedure, they know precisely, where it fails, they comprehend as laymen cannot at what point failure is inevitable from the impossibility of knowing what is in any man's heart, and the initiative in reform must rest with them. But that they ought, in the interests of permanent justice, to undeitake it, we do not doubt. No evil can poison justice like the common prevalence of perjury ; nor is there any on which the action of punish- ment is so directly operative,—for this obvious reason. The perjurer must always have some intelligence, he is very seldom influenced by passion, and nine times out of ten his temptation is comparatively slight,--a small bribe, a vague threat, or mere request from a friend. He sees the penalty, therefore, clearly, and if it can only be made certain, he will abstain. As we have said, the great experts must show us the method of securing certainty, but for ourselves, we are convinced that the nearest road lies through the introduction of a secondary charge. We would punish perjury as now, with seven years' penal servitude, and only simplify the proof, but we would also punish "deliberate lying in open Court ', by summary process before a magistrate with six months' hard labour. Witnesses know quite well what is and is not lying, and are dreadfully afraid of the moderate but speedily inflicted punishment. A Danish Colonial Magistrate, for whose exceptional character and ability we can vouch, once made a grimly comic experiment in this direction, and upon this principle. He was appalled by the endless perjuries com- mitted in cases before him, determined to stop them, and did. He, of course, said nothing of his method, but an English friend seated beside him on the Bench noticed that, whenever a witness told a palpable lie, he jumped. He asked the reason, and the Magistrate, after a caution, revealed his secret,—" My orderly stands behind the witness, and when- ever I put my left hand to my ear, that indicates that the evidence is false, and he runs .a pin into him." It is a well-known fact to the many who will recognise this story that the " sting of conscience " in this material form proved effectual, and that the Magistrate, who died honoured through- out Denmark, in three years turned an Alsatia into one of the
most orderly and law-abiding of communities. He could always get the truth. The device is not one to be imitated, trenching as it does too closely upon the domain of torture but its success shows us the true law,—that swift, moderate, and inevitable punishment will put down Perjury.
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