FALSE WITNESS.
IN "Patronage," an admirable though preachy novel by Miss Edgeworth, now, we fear, almost forgotten, there is one strikingly dramatic scene which we have some- where read was suggested to her by a story told at the dinner-table by an old Judge. The fortunes of the heroes of the tale, four well-born brothers, depend. upon the invalidity of a deed which they believe to be forged, and i which they are at last able to challenge n open Court. They have, however, very little positive evidence for their case, the time which has elapsed is against them, and they are baffled by the appearance of the surviving witness to the signature, an old and venerable man, with snow-white locks, who swears positively to the deed, and whose evidence seems unimpeachable. He does not, however, sit down when he should, but seeks to strengthen his testimony by a fact which would leave no room for doubt. The signer of the deed, avers the witness, buried a sixpence in the wax of the seal, and it must remain there still. Let the seal be broken, and if there is no sixpence, " then call me liar and perjured." The Judge orders the seal to be broken, the sixpence is found, and the wrong side is triumphing when the heroes' counsel discovers that the sixpence was struck in a reign pos- terior to the date of the deed. Defendant's counsel throws down his brief, the venerable witness faints away, and the Judge orders him to be detained, to be prosecuted by the Crown for perjury. A scene which, if reporters had Miss Rigeworth's dramatic skill—why has no Irishman made a social comedy of the " Absentee " ?—would have read nearly as effective, occurred during the recent trial of Lady Howard Us Walden for adultery. Among the evidence accUmulated against that innocent lady was a statement by a servant that in June, 1890, her watch, marked with her initials, had been found in her alleged lover's bed-room. That looked formidable evidence indeed, till the maker of the watch stepped into the witness-box, and proved, by his own oath and the testimony of his books, that the watch had not been sold to Lady de Walden, and consequently not engraved, and consequently not left in any bed-room whatever, till six months later. The jury immediately stopped the case, and the Judge (Sir F. Jeune), as he pro- nounced his decree, probably recollected Miss Edgeworth's story, but he ordered no detention ; and so far as appears, the Crown has taken no proceedings whatever. It is apparently left to Lady Howard de Walden to institute a prosecution if she pleases, at her own expense, just after • a long trial, and at the risk of again being aspersed by wit- nesses similar to those whose idea of truthfulness is revealed in the watch incident. . We want to know why Parliament, in some lucid interval of the Irish discussion, should not improve this procedure, making it as easy to obtain punishment for perjury as for assault ? It is certainly not for want of provocation that Judges and law reformers hesitate to make a change in the law, or rather, as we should propose, an a. ddition to it. By the common consent of all experts, perjury is frightfully On the increase. In the Divorce Court it seems to be expected, and that not only from co- respondents who are defending themselves, or blinded by a dishonourable notion of honour, but from witnesses who have been employed to ferret out evidence, or who have, in the course of business as waiters, chamber- maids, or even domestic servants, come across it, They are constantly treated by Judges, as well as by counsel, as false witnesses, that is, in fact, as purchased perjurers, yet they scarcely ever get prosecuted or even formally rebuked. It is considered the business, as it is certainly the enjoyment, of counsel to find them out, and there, after the verdict, the matter rests. Matters are not quite so bad in criminal trials, there being still a strong prejudice against swearing a men's liberty or life away ; but in the Bankruptcy Courts, and in some of the constant trials for great and complicated frauds, perjury is sometimes heaped on perjury till everybody in Court, except the skilled accountant, becomes in a measure bewildered, and the jury, when there is one, decide not on the evidence, but on the general probabilities of the case and the Judge's, usually obvious, opinion. No one of experience will deny that this state of things exists, and it is surely one which calls as seriously for the intervention of law- makers as the sale of liquor or the registration of intending voters. The truth seems to be that, owing to the tremen- dous publicity of the day which makes every trial ruinous to a reputation, and the vast scale on which all pecuniary transactions are conducted, the value of perjury has greatly risen in the market, the notoriety of a witness conferring on him, besides any fee that may be expected, a kind, of distinction, and the disposition to " stick to the horse fifty hands high" being thereby greatly developed. Moreover, just as the old fear of hell which kept witnesses straight is dying away, the causes we have just enumerated make trials for perjury burdensome and offensive to those who should institute them. They tend to inordinate length, they are minutely reported, and they cannot be carried through without a vast, sometimes an unendurable, expenditure. The disposition is to leave witnesses alone, even if they have palpably forsworn them- selves, and trust to public opinion rather than again enter a Court where anything may be hinted at, and where time costs about two guineas a minute. The result in no short time will be that perjury will be regarded as a minor offence ; that a class of professional perjurers will grow up, as in India, where witnesses act the scene wanted, lest they should contradict one another ; and that an appeal to the law will be considered, as it is now in many commercial cases, too costly, too dilatory, and too uncertain to be risked.
We cannot see why—in addition to the existing law, not in supersession of it—there should not be a moderate punishment for "false witness," to be inflicted either by the Court itself in which the perjury has occurred, or by a stipendiary Magistrate. Glaring perjury is surely con- tempt of Court, if anything is, and we cannot see why it should not be punished by the Judge himself who has heard the case. If that is too arbitrary, however, let the jury assist the Judge, treating the charge as one of the " points " on which they are to find a verdict, or, if that again is disapproved because Judge and jury are in some sense injured parties by the crime, let the accused be sent before a Magistrate, and tried exactly as he would be for an assault, the Clerk of the superior Court, or other official, being the prosecutor. We would not make the sentence severe, fixing six months as the maximum ; but we would make it both certain and swift, there being no necessity to prove a whole body of perjury, but only the false witness involved in swearing that the sixpence was placed in the seal before the sixpence was issued from the Mint. Depend upon it, the great body of perjurers would think such an Act atrocious. They are not in the least afraid of hell, and they care nothing about an Act which is never put in force ; but they would be in trepidation at the idea of a short trial ordered by a Judge, simple evidence that they are false witnesses, and the regular sentence, "three months' hard." There would be no objection whatever, if the case were grave enough, to prosecute under the existing laws ; but in dealing with such crimes, crimes committed usually, as in Miss Edge- worth's story, by petty agents, it is not the weight of the sentence but the certainty of it which really tells. Her "venerable witness, William Clerks," would never have risked three months of the plank-bed, and the social abhorrence which would follow on detection is not by the Magistrate's decision. A perjurer s not as a rule a bold ruffian to whom three months is nothing, but a man with some education, or he could not devise the plan, of a sneaking disposition, and intent before all things on being comfortable in body.
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