3 March 1804

Evidence

Securities

Ch. Procedure Technical

Falshood formed by

Law Agents for want of

confrontation

Sooner or later - either in the shape of a Case for an Opinion, or in the shape of a Brief, containing Instructions for the Trial the statement goes /passes/ from the sort of lawyers called an Attorney to another sort of Lawyer called a Counsel: and in /to/ the general of falshood /mendacity/ the assistance of this sort of lawyer is secured, by an interest which if it be not of exactly the same shape as the preceding, is at any rate fully adequate to the production of the effect. At this stage, happily /most commodiously/ for this branch of the profession, every idea of responsibility in respect of the truth of the statement, is compleatly vanished. The truth of the statement is in this quarter to be taken for granted: it would be officious, impertinent, troublesome to both parties, unusual, repulsive, incidious, repulsive, and thence even disreputable to doubt of it. It would require a degree of time and attention, which in the habitual course of practice no Counsel in considerable business has it in his power, had he it ever so much in his inclination, to bestow. In the estimation and good will of his Clients of both classes, Attorney and party, the Counsel rises in proportion to the degree of confidence with which he adopts and insists in the truth these statements in which on one side or the other, not to speak of both, there is almost always more or less of falsity, and of such falsity as any man in his place might see through /discover/, if it were his wish to do: a falsity, of which in a general point of view he may therefore be pronounced conscious. In the estimation of those on whom his emoluments and prospects depend he will rise /raise himself then/ in proportion to the zeal with which he exerts himself to gain evidence for this falshood /these falshoods/: and by such zeal there is no one in whose estimation he will lower himself.