date

9 Feb y 1807 + 13[?] Letter
9 Feb y 1807

+ 13[?]

Letter IV

Resolut. 6.7.8.9

Juries

2. Expense

4. Next as to expense: pecuniary expense. In the article of expenditure, as in the article of delay, in Natural procedure, as in technical, what is extraordinary admitts of no certain limit. As to ordinary cases,

In natural procedure, Judges and their subordinates being unpaid like Commissioners of /in/ the Courts of Conscience, are paid by Salary for the great majority of causes the standing expense is or might be nothing. But if witnesses or sources of real evidence are to be fetched from a distance when factitious expense is barred[?] out, this is all that as far as expense is concerned, can be done for justice by human reason or industry.

In the Birmingham Court of Conscience, as I suppose in every other, for though small, 8 d in the several parcels, divided between two officers, is taken from the Plff in the first instance. (Hutton p. 44.) But 8 d even 8 d is too much to take from him who has nothing: it saves time enough to take any thing from a man when two points have been settled /ascertained/ viz: that he has it to give, and that he deserves to lose it.

Where it costs a man nothing to convert the hand of justice into an instrument of vexation employing it to plague an adversary, there are but too many who will be apt to make this wicked /sinister/ use of it. True: but for juridical vexation, as for any thing else it is time enough to punish a man when it appears that he has been guilty: and then in the case in question there can be no difficulty. A man can not present himself to demand remedial justice, without presenting himself to receive and undergo penal justice, if eventually it be due to him. (Affliction is not fit ground for punishment: and every plaintiff to whom any thing is due is afflicted. In the natural and most usual order of things the plaintiff is in bonâ fide: a man would /does/ not put himself to the trouble of demanding justice, or expose himself to the hazard of its displeasure without just ground: temerity by which a man is led to think he has just ground when he has not,- is but an accident: malâ fides, the man being conscious of his having no just ground, a still rarer one: it can have no other prop /reliance/ to rest on than a plan for supporting the unjust demand by perjury[?], or which is tantamount to perjury. Understand[?] under natural procedure: for of technical procedure it is among the properties and the objects to raise up and keep up a breed of malâ fide suitors on both sides of the cause - partners of Judge and C o, partners and at the same time [...?] [...?] - bleeding[?] customers.
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    Description: 12 May 1808

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  • Title: [14 Feb 1807 letter IV Resolut]
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    letter IV

    Resolut 6.7.8.9

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    But on the /On the/ ground of the number of persons to whom by means of the expense the of the protection[?] of the law is denied in all civil cases the nature and amount of the price paid in this article /shape/ for the services whatever they may be of the learned persons to whose eye alone (except /excepted/ that of their partners[?] the malâ fide suitors in both sides of the cause excepted) the technical system causes[?] presents itself in a still more simple point of view.

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    But of the evil /mischief/ admitting it to be an /one/ evil, consisting in the exclusion of three fourths But of /To this degree/ three fourths of the whole number of the people may thus /to this degree be excluded from the benefit/ without any evil work /inconvenience/ [...?] be excluded from the benefit of civil justice, why not the remaining fourth? how slight soever the inconvenience in the present case of the exclusion put upon the three fourths, if it were extended on to the remaining fourth the addition thus made to the inconvenience would amount to no more than a fourth more of that which exists already, and which is so light as not to be felt as any thing, by those by and for whose by whose benefit it is produced.
  • Title: [9 April 1805 Evidence Securities]
    Description: 9 April 1805

    Evidence

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    ''. Recapitulation

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