is an unbroken record of honourable conduct; his life has been that of a clean-living, straightforward gentleman.  And now he stands before you charged with a miserable, paltry theft; charged with having robbed that generous friend, the brother of his own father, the guardian of his childhood and the benefactor who has planned and striven for his well-being; charged, in short, gentlemen, with a crime which every circumstance connected with him and every trait of his known character renders utterly inconceivable.  Now upon what grounds has this gentleman of irreproachable character been charged with this mean and sordid crime?  Baldly stated, the grounds of the accusation are these:  A certain learned and eminent man of science has made a statement, which the police have not merely accepted but have, in practice, extended beyond its original meaning.  That statement is as follows:  ’A complete, or nearly complete, accordance between two prints of a single finger ... affords evidence requiring no corroboration, that the persons from whom they were made are the same.’

“That statement, gentlemen, is in the highest degree misleading, and ought not to have been made without due warning and qualification.  So far is it from being true, in practice, that its exact contrary is the fact; the evidence of a finger-print, in the absence of corroboration, is absolutely worthless.  Of all forms of forgery, the forgery of a finger-print is the easiest and most secure, as you have seen in this court to-day.  Consider the character of the high-class forger—­his skill, his ingenuity, his resource.  Think of the forged banknotes, of which not only the engraving, the design and the signature, but even the very paper with its private watermarks, is imitated with a perfection that is at once the admiration and the despair of those who have to distinguish the true from the false; think of the forged cheque, in which actual perforations are filled up, of which portions are cut out bodily and replaced by indistinguishable patches; think of these, and then of a finger-print, of which any photo-engraver’s apprentice can make you a forgery that the greatest experts cannot distinguish from the original, which any capable amateur can imitate beyond detection after a month’s practice; and then ask yourselves if this is the kind of evidence on which, without any support or corroboration, a gentleman of honour and position should be dragged before a criminal court and charged with having committed a crime of the basest and most sordid type.  “But I must not detain you with unnecessary appeals.  I will remind you briefly of the salient facts.  The case for the prosecution rests upon the assertion that the thumb-print found in the safe was made by the thumb of the prisoner.  If that thumb-print was not made by the prisoner, there is not only no case against him but no suspicion of any kind.

“Now, was that thumb-print made by the prisoner’s thumb?  You have had conclusive evidence that it was not.  That thumb-print differed in the size, or scale, of the pattern from a genuine thumb-print of the prisoner’s.  The difference was small, but it was fatal to the police theory; the two prints were not identical.