16 July 1804

Procedure & Evidence

Evils causes

ch 5th Order

' 2. Delay

8. Time for receiving evidence thrown back to well after the time expendable in allegations without proof has been exhausted; instead of returning allegations and proof at the same instant; a union /a junction/ which takes place of itself in so far as the allegation of either party, with or without oath, is received as evidence.

9. In the examination of a party in the character of a witness, questions exhibited in writing, and put altogether into one instrument, answers into another, with intervals of weeks or months between one such instrument and another: instruments of that sort capable of being made to succeed one another, at the pleasure of a mala fide suitor, in causes of an indefinite length: although evidence from the same source might be extracted - the whole mass of it in one sitting in the compass of four hours or minutes, by viva voce examination - a mode universally acknowledged to be in every respect preferable.

10. The same sort of examination, if carried on reciprocally at the instance of the party first examined, made the business of a distinct cause, not commencing perhaps until after the conclusion of the former, although the reciprocal examinations might with encreased advantage be taken at one and the same sitting as above.

11. Arrangements in order of which, on the occasion of one and the same demand, at any period of a suit carried on in the less dilatory mode, a suit in the superlatively dilatory mode is made to intervene and destroy the use of whatever has been done in the course of the first suit: leaving to it no other effect than the production of so much useless delay vexation and expence: one sort of court carefully abstaining from the extraction of what is universally acknowledged to be, in all cases where /in which/ it is admitted the best evidence, as if for fear of infringing the monopoly possessed by the other sort of court in the profit to be made by the extraction of that sort of evidence.