date

28 April 1808 §.7. I. Reasons
28 April 1808

§.7.

I. Reasons for the Work

§.7.

But though in the early ages of society, legislation not being as yet applicable, judicature for the maintenance of internal security was the only instrument, yet when compared with legislation, and considered as a substitute, it was a most wretched makeshift.

1. Not a step could it make in its progress over the field of law without acting upon the principle of that species of law which when established by the legitimate and avowed legislator, is become a proverb of injustice, viz. an ex post facto law: obligations imposed, and to any degree of burthensomeness, the burthen of satisfaction under all its modifications, the burthen of punishment under all imaginable modifications, and always without warning: vexation inflicted on men in all imaginable shapes, men vexed and tormented, for non-compliance with acts of will which, so far from having been made known to them, had never been so much as formed in the breasts of the despots by whom they were thus carried into effect.

2. Not only were blows thus employed to produce the effect of words, men being thus governed, at first, as dogs must be from first to last, but whether, in respect of saving men from future blows on the like occasion, the blow should after all have the effect and perform the office which under a government of real law is performed by words, depended the performance of a function upon incidents having no necessary connection with the exercise of judicial authority, and the execution of which Judges leave to the last, frequently for obvious reasons, been more sollicitous to obstruct than to promote. viz. minuting down the histories of the several particular decisions carrying them to publication, abstracting from these particular decisions, as if in the way of distillation, sets of general rules, with a view of their having, though without the name, the effect of laws, and giving publication to those spurious laws thus stolen upon the people under a false name.
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