I do not of course assert that we criminalists need little scholarly knowledge of law, and ought to depend entirely upon knowledge of men. We need exactly as much more knowledge as our task exceeds that of the horse-dealer, but we can not do without knowledge of humanity. The immense onerousness of the judge’s office lies in just the fact that he needs so very much more than his bare legal knowledge. He must, before all things, be a jurist and not merely a criminalist; he must be in full possession not only of the knowledge he has acquired in his academy, but of the very latest up-to-date status of his entire science. If he neglects the purely theoretical, he degenerates into a mere laborer. He is in duty bound not only to make himself familiar with hundreds of things, to be able to consort with all sorts of crafts and trades, but also, finally, to form so much out of the material supplied him by the law as is possible to human power.
One of the criminal judge’s grossest derelictions from duty consists in his simply throwing the witness the question and in permitting him to say what he chooses. If he contents himself in that, he leaves to the witness’s conscience the telling of the truth, and the whole truth; the witness is, in such a case, certainly responsible for one part of the untruthful and suppressed, but the responsibility for the other, and larger part, lies with the judge who has failed to do his best to bring out the uttermost value of the evidence, indifferently for or against the prisoner. The work of education is intended for this purpose,--not, as might be supposed, for training the populace as a whole into good witnesses, but to make that individual into a good, trustworthy witness who is called upon to testify for the first, and, perhaps, for the last time in his life. This training must in each case take two directions--it must make him _want_ to tell the truth; it must make him _able_ to tell the truth. The first requirement deals not only with the lie alone, it deals with the development of complete conscientiousness. How to face the lie itself can not be determined by means of training, but conscientious answers under examination can certainly be so acquired. We are not here considering people to whom truth is an utter stranger, who are fundamentally liars and whose very existence is a libel on mankind. We consider here only those people who have been unaccustomed to speaking the full and unadulterated truth, who have contented themselves throughout their lives with “approximately,” and have never had the opportunity of learning the value of veracity. It may be said that a disturbingly large number of people are given to wandering, in conversation, and in the reproduction of the past. They do not go straight, quickly, and openly to the point, they loiter toward it--“If I do not reach it in a bee line, I can get along on by-paths, if not to-day, then to-morrow; and if I really do not get to it at all, I do get somewhere else.” Such people have not homes but inns--if they are not in one place, another will do.