15 Feb y 1807

Letter IV

Resolut. 6.7.8.9

Juries

Lawyers re fondness

The people, as was natural and unavoidable, the people at large, taking their conception of this mode of procedure from lawyers who alone had any tolerably correct and particular acquaintance with it, hence it is, that the causes and considerations which by their immediate operation served to recommend it to lawyers, served though in a less immediate way to recommend it to the people: and thus it is, that the more cruelly they have been tormented by it, the more closely they have been attached to it.

The more formative it has been loaded /encumbered/ with - the greater quantity of jargon that in all shapes has been made to accompany the language in which it is spoken of the more subservient it has been rendered to the ends of judicature, the less subservient to the ends of justice. But these formalities, being by the jargon sublimated into mysteries have served to strengthen the attachment of the people, by adding to (the cement of) affection the (still stronger) cement of awe and reverence.