180 APPENDIX. 
established that a barrister, in defending a case, has a right 
to make use of all fair and even what may appear to the 
witness unfair means for the defence. Nothing can tend 
more to lower a witness in the opinion of the Court and 
jury, or diminish the value of his evidence, than the mani- 
festation of a disposition to deal with his examiner as if he 
were a personal enemy, to evade the questions put, or to 
answer them with flippancy or anger. All such exhibitions 
invariably end in the discomfiture of the witness. It has 
been suggested that medical men on these occasions might 
take a lesson from lawyers, and observe how little they allow 
forensic differences, which they put on with their professional 
costume, to influence them in their intercourse with each 
other or with an adverse judge or jury. 
License of Counsel. 
Medical men have complained, and on many occasions 
justly, of the Acense of counsel. On this subject it may be 
well to consider what has been said by one of the highest 
authorities on the Bench, Chief Justice Erle :—“ The law 
trusts the advocate with a privilege in respect to the liberty 
of speech which is in practice bounded only by his own 
sense of duty; and he may have to speak upon subjects 
concerning the deepest interests of social life, and the inner- 
most feelings of the soul. The law also trusts him with a 
power of insisting upon answers to the most painful ques- 
tioning, and this power again is in practice only controlled 
by his own view of the interests of truth.” (Judgment in 
Kennedy v. Broun, 1862.) Thus it will be seen that almost 
unlimited powers of interrogation are intrusted to counsel by 
the law, and it is a serious question whether the unrestricted 
use (which it has been justly remarked means only the fre- 
quent abuse) of these enormous powers, is necessary or even 
favourable to the administration of justice. 
One of the most severe reprimands on this abuse came 
