a species of testimony which it regards as too inconclusive and too
liable to misconstruction to be allowed in a civil suit involving, it
may be, less than the value of a single dollar. True, it is a favorite
maxim of prosecutors, that "circumstances will not lie"; but it requires
little acquaintance with the history of criminal trials to prove that
circumstantial evidence has murdered more innocent men than all the
false witnesses and informers who ever disgraced courts of justice by
their presence; and the slightest reflection will convince us that this
shallow sophism contains even less practical truth than the general mass
of proverbs and maxims, proverbially false though they be. For not only
is the chance of falsehood, on the part of the witness who details the
circumstances, greater,--since a false impression can be conveyed with
far less risk of detection by distortion and exaggeration of a fact than
by the invention of a direct lie,--but there is the additional danger of
an honest misconception on his part; and every lawyer knows how hard
it is for a dull witness to distinguish between the facts and his
impressions of them, and how impossible it often is to make a witness
detail the former without interpolating the latter. But the greatest
risk of all is that the jury themselves may misconstrue the
circumstances, and draw unwarranted conclusions therefrom. It is an
awful assumption of responsibility to leap to conclusions in such cases,
and the leap too often proves to have been made in the dark. God help
the wretch who is arraigned on suspicious appearances before a jury who
believe that "circumstances won't lie"! for the Justice that presides at
such a trial is apt to prove as blind and capricious as Chance herself.
In reviewing the present trial in particular, one may well feel puzzled
to decide which of these deities presided over its conduct. A Greek or
Roman would have said, Neither,--but a greater than either,--Fate; and
we might almost adopt the old heathen notion, as we watch the downward
course of the doomed gentleman from this point, and note how invariably