confuse a jury--that is perversion of law to defeat
justice. The outrageous character of the practice is seen to better
advantage what contrasted with the tender consideration enjoyed by the
person actually accused and presumably guilty--the presumption of his
innocence being as futile a fiction as that a sheep's tail is a leg when
called so. Actually, the prisoner in a criminal trial is the only
person supposed to have a knowledge of the facts who is not compelled to
testify! And this amazing exemption is given him by way of immunity
from the snares and pitfalls with which the paths of all witnesses are
wantonly beset! To a visiting Lunarian it would seem strange indeed
that in a Terrestrial court of justice it is not deemed desirable for an
accused person to incriminate himself, and that it _is_ deemed desirable
for a subpoena to be more dreaded than a warrant.

When a child, a wife, a servant, a student--any one under personal
authority or bound by obligation of honor--is accused or suspected an
explanation is demanded, and refusal to testify is held, and rightly
held, a confession of guilt To question the accused--rigorously and
sharply to examine him on all matters relating to the offense, and even
trap him if he seem to be lying--that is Nature's method of criminal
procedure; why in our public trials do we forego its advantages? It may
annoy; a person arrested for crime must expect annoyance. It can not
make an innocent man incriminate himself, not even a witness, but it can
make a rogue do so, and therein lies its value. Any pressure short of
physical torture or the threat of it, that can be put upon a rogue to
make him assist in his own undoing is just and therefore expedient.

This ancient and efficient safeguard to rascality, the right of a
witness to refuse to testify when his testimony would tend to convict
him of crime, has been strengthened by a decision of the United States
Supreme Court. That will probably add another century or two to its
mischievous existence, and possibly prove the first act in such an
extension of it that eventually a witness can not be compelled to
testify at all. In fact it is difficult to see how he can be compelled
to now if he has the hardihood to exercise his constitutional right
without shame and with an intelligent consciousness of its limitless
application.

The case in which the Supreme Court made the decision was one in which a
witness refused to say whether he had rece