TEACHING OF EVIDENCE
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insuperable. The wide reading and inde ber of practitioners before our courts, even fatigable industry of Dean Wigmore should in commercial centers, it is as difficult to enable him to collect from many cases the strike it as for an unskillful carver to hit treatment of crucial situations by compe the second joint of a duck. Such attorneys, tent practitioners, which he very naturally almost of necessity, dispute every fact be fails to find in any two special trials. It is cause ignorant which of them are really doubtful whether he can increase the obli pivotal. Instead of massing their available gation under which he has already placed forces for assault on the stragetic point, the the profession in any more striking way campaign degenerates into a series of unde than by a comprehensive survey of the field cisive, wearisome skirmishes, consumptive of forensic strategy and tactics. of time, impotent in result. The creation The benefits of such instruction could not of a trained body of men, to whom the be, in any way, confined to his immediate rules of evidence should be, as it were, the students. It would at once be recognized tools of art, could not fail to prove an ines as useful in a wider field. Probably among timable boon to overworked judges, a great the conditions which have assisted to render economizer of time and expense to parties, the trial of causes protracted and of uncer and a blessing to the community at large, tain or untenable issue, few exceed in prac so deeply interested in the furtherance of tical effect the conspicuous lack, on this speedy and substantial justice. It is greatly side of the Atlantic, of a class of skilled and to be hoped that Dean Wigmore, who has trained advocates. Somewhere, in every done so much along kindred lines, may be case, there is a hinge upon which it legally able also to assist in bringing this to pass. and logically should turn. To a large num MONUMENT BEACH, MASS., November, 1906.
