Unfortunately, the practical value of an oath depends in almost exact ratio upon the depth of superstition of the person to whom it is administered. The moral man will speak truth for practical moral reasons. The immoral man will lie for practical immoral reasons. The latter in the old days was hindered by the oath from lying, because he firmly believed in the practical evil effects of breaking the oath. The perjurer of old was certainly “looking for trouble.” This is not a phrase of the “fancy,” but it exactly describes the oath-breaker’s position. Some of the few minor sequelæ of perjury were such domestic troubles as a curse which ran on to the seventh generation, or the perjurer’s death from lingering disease in twelve months, or that he would be turned into stone, or that the earth might swallow him up and that after death he would wander round as a vampire. These simple beliefs, which were no doubt part of the cave-dwellers’ early religious education, must have done a great deal to render the evidence of early man more trustworthy and accurate than that of his degenerate younger brother.
Though in an occasional burst of atavism an uneducated man may kiss his thumb instead of the Book, the bulk of humanity take any oath that is offered without any deep feeling of religious sanction, nor any particular fear of supernatural results. It is not altogether a matter of regret that this should be so. Our ceremony of oath-taking is really a Pagan one. Our very verb “to swear” takes us back to the pre-Christian days when man’s strength and his sword were the masters, and peace and goodwill had come to conquer the earth. To swear was a vow to Heaven upon a sword. When we offer the Book to a witness to swear upon, we really tender him, not a Christian thought, but the old Pagan oath which, splendid as it was, is no longer of force. It was a fine thing in its day when a knight vowed upon his sword “to serve the King right well by day and night, on field, on wave, at ting, at board—in peace, in war, in life or death; so help him Thor and Odin, likewise his own good sword.” It is no use replacing the sword by the Book if you retain the spirit of the sword in the old Pagan ceremony. The word “to swear” is very closely related to the word “sword,” and the very essence of swearing, deep down in the root form of the thing and the word itself, is to take one’s sword in one’s right hand, and fight for one’s own side with an energy that will make the Pagan gods shout with joy in the Valhalla. Medical witnesses and land surveyors are real Vikings in this respect, especially as it seems to me those of Celtic origin.
But of a truth it is not only the oath and the witnesses that want amendment. For when I suggest that it would be well in Court if we obeyed the command, “Swear not at all,” and that the outward use of the Book in the County Court is undesirable, it is because I feel that some such thing as a Court on the lines of the teaching of the Book ought not to be wholly impossible after 1,900 years of endeavour. You must drive out of the Court all the folk-lore with its Pagan notions of fighting and hired champions and oaths, and witnesses and heralds, and above all you must get rid of the anachronism of a Judge, and appoint in his place a peace-maker or official reconciler. The idea is not wholly Quixotic. Lord Brougham, a very practical reformer, had hopes of constructing Courts of Reconciliation in this country seventy years ago. We shall not close the courts of litigation and replace them by courts of reconciliation in a day. But I am optimist enough to hope that I may go down to my work one morning to find that we have been taken over by a new department called the Office of Peace, and that under the Royal Arms is our new official motto, “Blessed are the Peacemakers.”
CONCERNING DAUGHTERS.
“As is the mother so is the daughter.”
Ezekiel xvi., 44.
I am far from thinking Ezekiel knew much about it. True he was a married man and a householder, but I remember no evidence of his being the father of daughters. At all events if he thought that the education and bringing up of daughters was an inferior thing because of the authority of mothers, I think he was gravely mistaken. When the daughters of the middle ages were part of the household plant their mothers turned them out with certain practical qualities that made them a valuable asset to the comfort of mankind.
It was when unthinking fathers began to meddle in the affair and to consider the subject of the education of their daughters that the trouble began. The fathers—particularly the middle class Early Victorian father—discovered that it was a desirable thing to be a gentleman. Remembering and misapplying one of the catch words of his own education that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, he thought it was equally important to the success of his family that as his sons were to be gentlemen his daughters should be gentlewomen.
And this is where he missed it. The word “gentlewoman” is obscure, but it is certainly not the grammatical feminine of gentleman. True it has a narrow technical dictionary meaning, but it is used popularly to signify the result of a well-to-do middle class father’s education of his daughters, as in the phrase “Gentlewoman’s Employment Association” the name of an excellent society for helping daughters of the well-to-do father when he is deceased or has ceased to be well-to-do.