The good old lady who takes the witness-chair and swears that she knows the prisoner took her purse has perhaps quite as good a basis for her opinion and her testimony (even though she cannot give a single reason for her belief and becomes hopelessly confused on cross-examination) as the man who reaches the same conclusion ostensibly by virtue of having seen the defendant near by, observed his hand reaching for the purse, and then perceived him take to his heels.  She has never been taught to reason and has really never found it necessary, having wandered through life by inference or, more frankly, by guesswork, until she is no longer able to point out the simplest stages of her most ordinary mental processes.

As the reader is already aware, the value of all honestly given testimony depends first upon the witness’s original capacity to observe the facts; second upon his ability to remember what he has seen and not to confuse knowledge with imagination, belief or custom, and lastly, upon his power to express what he has, in fact, seen and remembers.

Women do not differ from men in their original capacity to observe, which is a quality developed by the training and environment of the individual.  It is in the second class of the witness’s limitations that women as a whole are more likely to trip than men, for they are prone to swear to circumstances as facts, of their own knowledge, simply because they confuse what they have really observed with what they believe did occur or should have occurred, or with what they are convinced did happen simply because it was accustomed to happen in the past.

Perhaps the best illustration of the female habit of swearing that facts occurred because they usually occurred, was exhibited in the Twitchell murder trial in Philadelphia, cited in Wellman’s “Art of Cross-Examination.”  The defendant had killed his wife with a blackjack, and having dragged her body into the back yard, carefully unbolted the gate leading to the adjacent alley and, retiring to the house, went to bed.  His purpose was to create the impression that she had been murdered by some one from outside the premises.  To carry out the suggestion, he bent a poker and left it lying near the body smeared with blood.  In the morning the servant girl found her mistress and ran shrieking into the street.

At the trial she swore positively that she was first obliged to unbolt the door in order to get out.  Nothing could shake her testimony, and she thus unconsciously negatived the entire value of the defendant’s adroit precautions.  He was justly convicted, although upon absolutely erroneous testimony.

The old English lawyers occasionally rejected the evidence of women on the ground that they are “frail.”  But the exclusion of women as witnesses in the old days was not for psychological reasons, nor did it originate from a critical study of the probative value of their testimony.

Though the conclusions to which women frequently jump may usually be shown by careful interrogation to be founded upon observation of actual fact, their habit of stating inferences often leads them to claim knowledge of the impossible—­“wiser in [their] own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.”