date

23 Oct r 1807 L d Eldon's Bill
23 Oct r 1807

L d Eldon's Bill

'.1.

Division vice Court

Various are the instruments that have been employed for making laws alteration-proof: such as here present themselves are reducible to three:- solemnity, oath, treaty.

1. It was by solemnity that the property of inalterability was conferred on Magna Charta. In the histories of the time and in the law books of other times may be seen the materials of which this /the/ instrument was composed, and the expence incurred in various articles for the making of it. Lungs exercised in making proclamation; souls consigned to eventual damnation by conditional [...?] and [...?]: candles burnt and expended in the making of the conveyance.

Whatsoever be the virtue of this instrument it can never be otherwise than comparative. How tight soever the knot which is tied by a hundred proclamations, a hundred an one will serve for the untying it /may be untied by a hundred and one/: if twenty bishops have been employed in turning the tide of damnation one way: one and twenty bishops, at least if in an average equally stocked with holiness, will have strength enough to turn it the contrary way, if twenty wax candles were consumed /destroyed/ in rendering the law indestructible, one and twenty candles if of equal weight and firmness will suffice for the destruction of it.

In the days of the French Revolution, at /on the occasion of/ the fixation of the Constitution, such was the maturity of the age, or such the modesty of the men, that though the body of regulation was to cover the whole field of constitutional law the duration of the inalterability was limited to twenty years. But if men /a people/ have gone on for twenty years living under a set of bad laws so may they for any number of years more. By custom men get /become/ reconciled to many an evil, which at the first stroke was scarce endurable. In legislation it is at the outset that the inconveniences attached /incident/ to novelty /experiment/ are most apt to shew themselves /take their rise/.

Generous legislators! having the fee-simple[?] of infallibility at their command, they gave themselves no more than a twenty year lease of it. On the occasion neither proclamations, nor damnation, nor candles were employed. The causes material and efficient of solemnity, vary with the age, not to mention other circumstances. But whatsoever they were that on that occasion were most suitable, it was not by any want of them that the result of the experiment were rendered so unfavourable.
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