June 1805

Evidence

Introd.

False Ends re Judge

''.3. corruption cause

Keep this as it is, or re-write, setting out with the principles of renumeration and quoting the London Police Act as an application of them.

''.3. Corruption universal: cause, the mode in which the Judge was paid. /took payment./

We have been seeing how natural it was, (whether there were or were not an habitual exercise under some such name as that of legislative power one authority recognised as superior to that of the Judge, and as such more competent in the establishment of universally binding and settled rules /regulations/,) how natural it was (in what ever other department of the field of government the power of the legislator should have exercised itself,) that this narrow /confined/ department, the conduct of the business of judicial procedure should have been lodged or rather left to fall of itself into the hands of the Judge. We come now to see how natural, or rather necessary it was, that in the then existing state of society in other respects, this power should have been abused: abused to the utmost power of possible, not to say of considerable abuse: abused to the length of having given birth to these monstrous systems of iniquity and depredation /fraud and extraction/ which may be seen every where administered under the name of justice.

The principle of corruption the cause of this abuse is extremely simple: it consists altogether in the mode in which, in the instance of the judicial office, reward was attached to labour, renumeration /recompense/ to service. Even in the present days of private & public opulence, much more in those days of poverty the quantity of pay left capable of being increased with the quantity of labour real or apparent and the quantity of such labour left capable of being increased to an indefinite amount at the will of the Judges. Of labour so applied, a quantity adequate to the demand could not have been had /be had/ without recompense /wages/: in those days of public indigence such recompense could not have been administered /attached itself/ to the service in the only form in which, without giving birth to the ensuing corruption it could have attached itself, viz: that of settled salary, pure of incidental /occasional/ emoluments, such as in English are called fees. It might indeed have attached itself to labour and without producing any such corruptive effect have been attached even in the shape of fees, had the number of incidents productive of such fees been so circumstanced, as not to have been incresable[?] by any end[?] worthy[?] /endeavour on the part/ of the Judge, or even though they had been so increasible[?] had not the pockets of the suitors been among the pockets out of which they were to come.