to their court, and to be made to invoke their vengeance upon himself, or those dear to him, if he has told a falsehood in what he has stated, or tells one in what he is about to state.  Men so situated adhere habitually, and I may say religiously, to the truth; and I have had before me hundreds of cases in which a man’s property, liberty, or life has depended upon his telling a lie, and he has refused to tell it to save either; as my friend told me, ’they had not learned the value of a lie’, or rather, they had not learned with how much impunity a lie could be told in the tribunals of civilized society.  In their own tribunals, under the pipal-tree or cotton-tree, imagination commonly did what the deities, who were supposed to preside, had the credit of doing; if the deponent told a lie, he believed that the deity who sat on the sylvan throne above him, and searched the heart of man, must know it; and from that moment he knew no rest—­he was always in dread of his vengeance; if any accident happened to him, or to those dear to him, it was attributed to this offended deity; and if no accident happened, some evil was brought about by his own disordered imagination.[6]

In the tribunals we introduce among them, such people soon find that the judges who preside can seldom search deeply into the hearts of men, or clearly distinguish truth from falsehood in the declarations of deponents; and when they can distinguish it, it is seldom that they can secure their conviction for perjury.  They generally learn very soon that these judges, instead of being, like the judges of their own woods and wilds, the only beings who can search the hearts of men, and punish them for falsehood, are frequently the persons, of all others, most blind to the real state of the deponent’s mind, and the degree of truth and falsehood in his narrative; that, however well-intentioned, they are often labouring in the ‘darkness visible’ created by the native officers around them.  They not only learn this, but they learn what is still worse, that they may tell what lies they please in these tribunals; and that not one of them shall become known to the circle in which they move, and whose good opinion they value.  If, by his lies told in such tribunals, a man has robbed another, or caused him to be robbed, of his property, his character, his liberty, or his life, he can easily persuade the circle in which he resides that it has arisen, not from any false statements of his, but from the blindness of the judge, or the wickedness of the native officers of his court, because all circles consider the blindness of the one, and the wickedness of the other, to be everywhere very great.