fess it"; and Charles XL, said to be the cqua! of Gustavus Adolphus in moral greatness, ordained, in the year 1682, that no one should have the right to bring his case be fore the King's court (where the King pre sided in person), without binding himself upon oath to plead the case "as an impartial man." But the general law of procedure enacted in 1734 introduced a formal or tech nical rule or theory of evidence, according to which, in the absence of written docu ments, every conclusion was made to de pend upon the testimony of two witnesses, against whom no objection could be made, grounded on the fact of relationship to the parties or of interest in the case. The testi mony of a party was rejected as unworthy of belief, as it was in common law countries until a recent period, unless he were testi fying against himself. In place of the an cient oral trial there was substituted a sys tem which somewhat resembles that of an American court-martial, under which all the processes, pleadings, motions, documentary evidence, oral evidence, in short, every step in a case, was taken down in a long docu ment called a Protokoll. Sessions of court were held at irregular intervals, and long periods of time might supervene between one joint of this protokoll and another. Then the judge would take the record or protokoll home to his house and study it, and when he got through studying it, he would assemble court and would tell the "twelve good men and true." as the English and Americans would say, that, according to certain hardand-fast rules of evidence, their conclusion must be so and so. Whereupon they would all duck their heads in assent. If, however, some of them should have the courage to dissent, then if the judge could get a single one of the twelve on his side, he carried the day against the other eleven. To this crowning absurdity has degenerated a sys tem under which, without doubt, the jurors were the original triers of the facts upon their oaths and their consciences, as they are now in England and America. This system has degenerated to such scanualoui
results, if we may believe the denunciations which Herr Fahlcrantz has put it, that a party to a lawsuit is at liberty to speak or to hide the truth, or to tell a half truth or я. whole lie, quite according to his pleasure. Herr Fahlcrantz thinks that the very first condition for restoring the Swedish legal procedure to what it ought to be. is to re store the sense of the people and of the legislators to the conception that the truth, and the truth without any restriction, must prevail in every forensic controversy. If we may credit his severe denunciations in these pages, we must conclude that in this country not only the opinions of lawyers, but even those of laymen, have become so warped and distorted with respect to this question, that it is thought to be an unnatural hard ship to claim the truth from the parties to a litigation, and that such a claim is impu dent, fantastical and almost immoral,—it being, they say, the natural right of every defendant to deny, and the right of every plaintiff to prove his case, in the "legal" way. This prejudice against the truth in the ad ministration of justice seems to be, in his country, as inelastic and unyielding as the wooden shoe on the foot of a Dutch peasant, and clung to with equal fondness. But it seems that these honest Swedes— honest and morally sound in all private mat ters—as soon as they begin to direct their thoughts into the channels of a lawsuit, be come absolutely indifferent to the claims of truth and honesty. A merchant, a farmer, a bank director, who, in private life and in business, never tells a He, or does a dishon est act, needs only to hear the word "sum mons" in order to alter his entire behavior. Before the court he denies that he received the summons which was served upon him; he denies that he knows who are the mem bers of the plaintiff firm, when sued by a partnership; he denies having received let ters from his opponent; he repudiates wit nesses of whose honesty he, as a man, has no doubt; he refuses to show books and docu ments upon which the right of the opposing party depends; he refuses to say whether he
