The patience required for taking testimony is needful also in

cross-examination. Not only children and slow-witted folk, but also bright persons often answer only ``yes'' and ``no,''[1] and these bare answers demand a patience most necessary with just this bareness, if the answers are to be pursued for some time and consecutively. The danger of impatience is the more obvious inasmuch as everyone recognizes more or less clearly that he is likely to set the reserved witness suggestive questions and so to learn things that the witness never would have said. Not everybody, indeed, who makes monosyllabic replies in court has this nature, but in the long run, this common characteristic is manifest, and these laconic people are really not able to deliver themselves connectedly in long speeches. If, then, the witness has made only the shortest replies and a coherent well-composed story be made of them, the witness will, when his testimony is read to him, often not notice the untruths it might contain. He is so little accustomed to his own prolonged discourse that at most he wonders at his excellent speech without noticing even coarse falsehoods. If, contrary to expectation, he does notice them, he is too chary of words to call attention to them, assents, and is glad to see the torture coming to an end. Hence, nothing but endless patience will do to bring the laconic witness to say at least enough to make his information coherent, even though brief. It may be presented in this form for protocol.

Section 6. (d) Presuppositions of Evidence-Taking.

One of the most important rules of evidence-taking is not to suppose that practically any witness is skilled in statement of what he remembers. Even of child training, Frbel[2] says, ``Men must be drawn out, not probed.'' And this is the more valid in jurisprudence, and the more difficult, since the lawyers have at most only as many hours with the individual as the teacher has years. However, we must aim to draw the witness out, and if it does not work at first, we must nevertheless not despair of succeeding.

The chief thing is to determine the witness's level and then meet him on it. We certainly can not succeed, in the short time allowed us, to raise him to ours. ``The object of instruction'' (says Lange[3]) ``is to endow the pupil with more apperceptive capacity, i. e., to

[1] Pathological conditions, if at all distinct, are easily recognizable, but there is a very broad and fully occupied border country between pathological and normal conditions. (Cf. O. Gross: Die Affeklage der Ablehnung. Monatschrift fr Psychiatrie u. Neurologie, 1902, XII, 359.)

[2] Frbel: Die. Mensehenersiehung. Keilhau 1826.

[3] K. Lange: ber Apperzeption. Plauen 1889.

make him intellectually free. It is therefore necessary to discover his `funded thoughts,' and to beware of expounding too much.'' This is not a little true. The development of apperceptive capacity is not so difficult for us, inasmuch as our problem is not to prepare our subject for life, but for one present purpose. If we desire, to this end, to make one more intellectually free, we have only to get him to consider with independence the matter with which we are concerned, to keep him free of all alien suggestions and inferences, and to compel him to see the case as if no influences, personal or circumstantial, had been at work on him. This result does not require merely the setting aside of special influences, nor the setting aside of all that others have said to him on the matter under discussion, nor the elucidation of the effect of fear,[1] of anger, of all such states of mind as might here have been operative,--it requires the establishment of his unbiased vision of the subject from a period antecedent to these above-mentioned influences. Opinions, valuations, prejudices, superstitions, etc., may here be to a high degree factors of disturbance and confusion. Only when the whole Augean stable is swept out may the man be supposed capable of apperception, may the thing he is to tell us be brought to bear upon him and he be permitted to reproduce it.