excellent ground for caution; but the
fact that the man makes a certain statement may still be a help to the
ascertainment of truth. Why should that help be rejected? Bentham
scarcely admits of any exception to the general rule of taking any
evidence you can get--one exception being the rather curious one of
confession to a Catholic priest; secrecy in such cases is on the whole,
he thinks, useful. He exposes the confusion implied in an exclusion of
evidence because it is not fully trustworthy, which is equivalent to
working in the dark because a partial light may deceive. But this is
only a part of a whole system of arbitrary, inconsistent, and technical
rules worked out by the ingenuity of lawyers. Besides the direct injury
they gave endless opportunity for skilful manoeuvring to exclude or
admit evidence by adopting different forms of procedure. Rules had been
made by judges as they were wanted and precedents established of
contradictory tendency and uncertain application. Bentham contrasts the
simplicity of the rules deducible from 'utility' with the amazing
complexity of the traditional code of technical rules. Under the
'natural' system, that of utility, you have to deal with a quarrel
between your servants or children. You send at once for the disputants,
confront them, take any relevant evidence, and make up your mind as to
the rights of the dispute. In certain cases this 'natural' procedure has
been retained, as, for example, in courts-martial, where rapid decision
was necessary. Had the technical system prevailed, the country would
have been ruined in six weeks.[421] But the exposure of the technical
system requires an elaborate display of intricate methods involving at
every step vexation, delay, and injustice. Bentham reckons up nineteen
separate devices employed by the courts. He describes the elaborate
processes which had to be gone through before a hearing could be
obtained; the distance of courts from the litigants; the bandying of
cases from court to court; the chicaneries about giving notice; the
frequent nullification of all that had been done on account of some
technical flaw; the unintelligible jargon of Latin and Law-French which
veiled the proceedings from the public; the elaborate mysteries of
'special pleading'; the conflict of jurisdictions, and the manufacture
of new 'pleas' and new technical rules; the 'entanglement of
jurisdictions,' and especially the distinction between law and equity,
whic