It follows that our rules of evidence are unknown on the European
continent and in every country in which courts are composed of
judges only--that is, of men with special training and capacity for
the work of weighing testimony--or in which the legal customs have
been created by such courts. There the litigants follow the natural
order, and carry with them before the bench everything that has any
relation to the case whatever, and leave the court to examine it and
allow it its proper force. Our own changes in the law of evidence
are all in this direction. The amount of excluded testimony--that
is, of testimony with which we are afraid to trust the jury--has
been greatly diminished during the last few years, and, considering
the growth of popular intelligence, properly diminished. The
tendency of legislation now is toward letting the jury hear
everybody--the plaintiff and defendant, the prisoner, the wife, the
husband, and the witness with a pecuniary interest in the result of
the trial--and put its own estimate on what the testimony amounts
to.
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