ond of meeting proposed changes by
saying that they are Utopian; that they are good in theory, but bad in
practice; that they are too good to be realised, and so forth, then I
can promise him that he will in that book hear of something very much
to his advantage.[3]

An incidental advantage--which is worth mentioning--of making legal
instances the medium of instruction in practical logic, would be that
people would--not learn law, of course, in the present state of our
system, but they would have their attention called in a direct and
business-like way to the lawyer's point of view, and those features of
procedure in which every man and woman in the land has so immediate an
interest. Perhaps if people interested themselves more seriously than
is implied by reading famous cases in the newspapers, we should get
rid, for one thing, of the rule which makes the accused person in a
criminal case incompetent to testify; and, for another, of that
infamous license of cross-examination to credit, which is not only
barbarous to those who have to submit to it, but leads to constant
miscarriage of justice in the case of those who, rather than submit to
it, will suffer wrong.

It will be said, I daresay, that overmuch scruple about our
propositions and the evidence for them will reduce men, especially the
young, to the intellectual condition of the great philosopher,
Marphurius, in Moliere's comedy. Marphurius rebukes Sganarelle for
saying he had come into the room;--'What you should say is, that it
_seems_ I am come into the room.' Instead of the downright
affirmations and burly negations so becoming to Britons, he would
bring down all our propositions to the attenuation of a possibility or
a perhaps. We need not fear such an end. The exigencies of practical
affairs will not allow this endless balancing. They are always driving
men to the other extreme, making us like the new judge, who first
heard the counsel on one side and made up his mind on the merits of
the case, until the turn of the opposing counsel came, and then the
new counsel filled the judge with so many doubts and perplexities,
that he suddenly vowed that nothing would induce him to pay any heed
to evidence again as long as he lived.

I do not doubt that I shall be blamed in what I have said about
French, and about history, for encouraging a spirit of superficiality,
and of contentment with worthless smatterings of things. To this I
should answer that, as Archbisho