ot admissible in a court of
justice to prove or disprove either a cause or a defence. The rules of
evidence have been worked out by centuries of experience of courts in
jury trials, and are admirably adapted to avoid the danger of error as
to fact. I fully agree that in American courts the trial judges have not
been entrusted with as wide discretion in the matter of admitting or
rejecting evidence as they should have, and judgments have been reversed
on technical errors in admitting testimony which should have been
affirmed. As time goes on, however, the rule against hearsay evidence,
instead of losing its force, is demonstrating its usefulness. The error
and injustice that are committed in the public press by inaccurate,
garbled and sometimes false statements of facts are increased in their
injurious effect by the wider publication that newspapers have today,
and the requirement that when a fact is to be proven in court it should
be proven by those who have a personal knowledge of it, is one of the
most wholesome and searching tests of truth that the whole range of
adjective law furnishes. The opportunity for cross-examination, for
finding out the bias of the witness, the advantage or disadvantage of
his point of observation, the accuracy or inaccuracy in his recollection
of the details of what he saw, are all means of reaching the real truth
that the introduction of hearsay evidence would entirely exclude.

It is now more than fifteen years since this country was following with
bated breath the judicial investigation of the charges against Captain
Dreyfus for treason in having sold secrets of the French War Office to
Germany. Under the civil law procedure, there is little, if any,
limitation upon the kind of evidence which can be introduced to sustain
the issue on either side, and the rule against hearsay evidence does not
prevail. The shock given to the whole community of the United States by
the character of evidence received to help the court determine the
Dreyfus issue, was itself enough to show that the confidence of the
public in the justice of the rule against hearsay evidence had grown
rather than diminished with years.

Yet I am far from saying that we may not have improvement in our laws
concerning testimony in court. The protection of those accused of crime
contained in some of our constitutional restrictions may be too great.
The charge against the administration of justice in the present system
is that i