money orders, registered letter receipts, letters, pension papers, and
in smuggling, and in short, on any kind of document where it becomes
necessary to establish the identity of the writer, the expert is
called in. Life, liberty, honor, and property are frequently balanced
on a pen point--a few marks of the pen being the determining feature
of many a case.

The handwriting of the schoolboy and schoolgirl, though crude, is
conventional and idealized. It has but few characteristics so long as
the school model or copy-book hand is the goal. The pupil gives
constant attention to the handwriting as well as to the thought. A
number of students of about the same grade, under the same teacher,
will write much alike. Fifteen or twenty of these students could each
write a line on a page and it might baffle a layman, and perhaps
puzzle an expert, to tell whether or not more than one person wrote
the page. This constant striving after one ideal, and putting thought
on the handwriting, had drawn them all toward that ideal and away from
individuality.

The employment of professional handwriting experts as witnesses in
court cases that often involve enormous sums of money, or the liberty
or even the lives of suspected malefactors, has awakened widespread
interest in the methods of this class of experts, their resources and
capabilities in conserving the ends of justice.

Many uninformed people appear to look on the handwriting expert as one
who, by intuition or the possession of some mysterious occult power,
is enabled to distinguish at a glance the true and the spurious in any
questioned handwriting. Nothing could be further from the fact.