ORDEALS AND OATHS. 321 



legislators to use oaths, not merely in special and solemn matters, but 

 as means of securing honesty in the details of public business. When 

 this has been done, the consequences to public morals have been dis- 

 astrous. There is no need to hunt up ancient or foreign proofs of this, 

 seeing how conspicuous an instance is the state of England early in the 

 present century, while it was still, as a contemporary writer called it, 

 " a land of oaths," and the professional perjurer plied a thriving trade. 

 A single illustration will suffice, taken from the valuable treatise on 

 Oaths, published in 1834, by the Rev. James Endell Tyler: "During 

 the continuance of the former system of custom-bouse oaths, there 

 were houses of resort where persons were always to be found ready at 

 a moment's warning to take any oath required ; the signal of the busi- 

 ness for which they were needed was this inquiry, 'Any damned soul 

 here ? ' " Nowadays this enormous excess of public oaths has been 

 much cut down, and with the best results. Yet it must be evident to 

 students of sociology that the world will not stop short at this point. 

 The wider question is coming into view, What effect is produced on 

 the every-day standard of truthfulness by the doctrine that fraudulent 

 lying is in itself a minor offense, but is converted into an awful crime 

 by the addition of a ceremony and a formula? It is an easily-stated 

 problem in moral arithmetic ; on the credit side, Government is able 

 to tighten with an extra screw the consciences of a shaky class of wit- 

 nesses and public officers ; on the debit side, the current value of a 

 man's word is correspondingly depreciated through the whole range 

 of public and private business. As a mere sober student of social 

 causes and effects, following along history the tendencies of opinion, 

 I cannot doubt for a moment how the public mind must act on this 

 problem. I simply predict that where the judicial ordeal is already 

 gone, there the judicial oath will sooner or later follow. Not only do 

 symptoms of the coming change appear from year to year, but its 

 greatest determining cause is unfolding itself day by day before ob- 

 servant eyes, a sight such as neither we nor our fathers ever saw 

 before. 



How has it come to pass that the sense of the sanctity of intel- 

 lectual truth, and the craving after its full and free possession, are so 

 mastering the modern educated mind ? This is not a mystery hard to 

 unravel. Can any fail to see how in these latter years the methods 

 of scientific thought have come forth from the laboratory and the mu- 

 seum to claim their powers over the whole range of history and philos- 

 ophy, of politics and morals ? Truth in thought is fast spreading its 

 wide waves through the outside world. Of intellectual truthfulness, 

 truthfulness in word and act is the outward manifestation. In all 

 modern philosophy there is no principle more fertile than the doctrine 

 so plainly set forth by Herbert Spencer that truth means bringing 

 our minds into accurate matching with the realities in and around us ; 

 so that both intellectual and moral truth are bound up together in 



VOL. IX. 21 



