3 March 1804

Evidence

Securities

Ch. Procedure Technical

Declaration of bona fides

Examples

Note (a)

(a) As to the partial expedients, they are not only constructed upon a bad plan - but were according to their bad plan, badly executed.

The affidavit for holding to Court may serve as a sample of the rest. It requires much more candour than is consistent with evidence to suppose, that the lawyer by whom it was contrived had it really in his wish to carry the remedy a hairs breadth further than it was possible for him to avoid carrying it.

1. The debt must indeed be sworn to: but nothing like a negative is required to be put upon the existence of a set off; + so that in the case of mutual claims, the debtor upon the ballance has it as much in his power to employ this coercion for his creditor in this way, as the creditor to seek a necessary security against his debtor.

2. The coercion, if justifiable, is so on no other supposition than that of its being necessary to prevent the removal of the defendant through the apprehension of insolvency out of the reach of law /justice/. But no warrant /declaration/ on the part of the creditor is required, professing so much as the least apprehension /suspicion/ on his part that any such deficiency is to be apprehended.

It is for want of regulations /amendments/ thus obvious - thus plainly indicated by every days experience, that this power continues to be employed as an instrument of oppression under the eyes of these, to whom oppression in every shape, if the routine of language is to be believed, is the object of continual and inescapable /infrequent and implausible[?]/ abhorrence.