18 March 1808

Letter V

§.6. Reasons

Ends of Justice

5. Non-Justiciability Causes

Factitious causes Positive

5. Laws or usages establishing asylums (local asylums) as places of refuge within which the operations necessary to the securing of forthcomingness on the part of persons or things for the purpose of justiciability.

6. Laws or usages establishing asylums, of a chronological nature: that is appointing days in the week, or hours in the day of twenty four hours, during which operations necessary to the securing of forthcomingness on the part of persons or things for the purpose of justiciability are not suffered to be performed.

7. Laws or usages granting to proprietors of property in this or that shape the privilege of not being subjectable to the obligations of justice: as for instance holders of land or certain interests in land, holders of government annuities &c &c.

Take the case of landholders. A law to this effect is a license to all men, on condition of being or becoming landholders, to become swindlers: securing to every wrongdoer, on terms thus easy, the profit of his own wrong.

A law to this effect has so obviously and incontestably for its result, that it can not but have had among its object the infusing a corruption of the worst kind seen among the morals of the people: and as the power of the country is chiefly in the hands of landholders, pouring in the corruption at the fountain head.

This iniquity, this[?] which a more flagrant one it passes the wit of men to conceive, has come in latter days, at so advanced a state of society, several ages after whatsoever reasons it ever had for its support have vanished, found lawyers profligate and audacious enough to stand forth in the character of its protectors, rendering themselves accomplices of all such dishonest persons as by the encouragement thus held out shall be prevailed upon to become cheats: non-lawyers to the amount of a deplorable majority, weak enough to be seduced by such authority (for every thing of reason is out of the question, or pretend[?] [...?] to pretend to be convinced by it.