20 March 1808

Letter V

§.6. Reasons

Ends of Justice

Fallaciousness Causes

Factitious Causes, Positive.

5. Laws or usages affording positive invitation and encouragement to mendacity, by allowing to the party in the wrong a sure and safe expedient for deriving from falshood an advantage, sometimes temporary, sometimes definitive; viz. for want of punishment for false allegations, whether temerarious only or mendacious: as in the case of pleadings not upon oath.

6. Laws or usages encreasing the chance of false and fallacious evidence on each individual occasion by placing and keeping the public morals in a general and habitual state of corruption in respect of the disregard to truth: plunging in habits of mendacity not private persons only but public functionaries invested with the most important trusts: as for example compelling parties to other falshoods, on pain of loss of cause: as in pleadings in general, and in particular in the sort of instrument called a Bill in Equity.

7. In the case of the sets of occasional and unlearned Judges called Jurymen, acting under the direction of a learned Judge, Laws or usages forcing them, on pain of giving impunity to all delinquents, to express by the word Guilty an indiscriminate pursuance of the truth of a mass of allegations in which under the name of an indictment or information or a declaration a quantity of notorious falshood is constantly intermixt.

8. In the same case habituating them to the solemn utterances of specific falshoods for example in relation to the value of goods taken in the way of theft, and this for the express purpose of putting a contempt upon the ordinances of the legislator by exempting criminals from a degree of punishment to which it is his declared intention they should be consigned: and this under the eyes and with the frequently declared approbation of the learned and official guardians of the public morals.