VOL. LIV

NUMBER 6

T

HE Shakespeare tercentenary did not pass without the inevitable touch of humour-in this instance in the shape of a grave judicial decree on the Bacon-Shakespeare literary controversy.

In the midst of the mirth aroused by this weighty judgment of an artificial problem that has long ceased to engage the attention of serious scholars, we have failed to note that the nature of the decision, as a decision, has received due attention. No one appears to have noted that we have another instance and a curiously interesting one, of the inherent obliquity of the laws of evidence, as these are understood and practised in our courts.

I do not doubt but that the learned judge applied the customary tests with rigid impartiality, to the evidence before him, and the application of the legal rules of evidence to the facts logically resulted in a wrong decisionI do not refer, of course, to the case under trial, but only to the literary problem that was incidentally decided upon.

In other words, if the trial had been for murder, and the same evidence against the murderer was offered, as that against Shakespeare, the accused man would have been condemnedalthough perhaps, no more guilty than it is true that Shakespeare's authorship

of the play bearing his name, is a fiction.

We have once before, in these pages, called attention to the fallacious nature of the legal rules of evidence. The subject appears to us to be a very serious one. It is by no means academic. The courts are heavily handicapped in an effort to secure substantial justice, by the inherent faults of that system of traditions and falsehoods known as the rules of evidence. Again and again is the very meat of a case, its very kernel of truth and right wholly ruled out by the "rules of evidence."

I cannot think that our age will long endure this monstrous perversion in the name of justice.

There is no question more in need of discussion, and action, than that of judicial procedure. The prodigious cost, the clumsy machineries, the hideous formalities, and the false leavening of the process of justice in American courts is a tax on the vitality of the nation. What one of our great statesmen, searching high and low for a "moral issue," on which to appear before the electorate, will stumble on this really great issue and bring it into the limelight?

We predict for such a one a success of unparalleled brilliancy.