Expert Evidence.
I am greatly pleased with something I have been reading that was said by William Travers Jerome, the famous ex-district attorney of New York City. He declared:
"I have had a very wide experience with expert testimony in lunacy, and, with one exception, I do not recall a single instance in which such testimony was not honest. In no case with which I have been connected has there been to my knowledge a miscarriage of justice, and in every case the State's expert evidence on insanity has been borne out by subsequent facts."
It is too much to hope, however, that this authoritative statement will have weight with the comic paragraphers, who have added the expert witness to their rogues' gallery.
By his side are the cross mother-in-law, the extravagant wife, the cooking-school graduate whose viands are adamant, the lying fisherman, the over-charging lawyer, the smart-Aleck Sunday-school scholar, and all the rest of the familiar cast of characters.
There is as much truth in one of them as in another, and that is practically none at all. They all do a world of harm to a vast number of excellent, faithful people, and fill our lives with unconscious but none the less harmful prejudices. They teach us to think and speak unfairly, to condemn en masse, and to allow ourselves to be influenced by passion and whim rather than reason and justice.
I have sometimes thought that I should like to be the editor of a comic paper, and banish these mischievous alleged jokes to the limbo of all other lies.
But perhaps I should find myself editor not of a paper but of a vacuum.