16 May 1808

I. Reasons

Ch.V. Advantages

§.8./7./ Fiction ousted

When the system of Scottish procedure began to develop itself, neither the need of any such instruments presented itself in any thing like equal degree, nor the facilities for using.

1. Not the need of them. For being little embarassed by Parliaments, the Court of Session, the child and instrument of Royal power, found little difficulty in the pursuit of whatever happened to be its own views - that is, the views of the majority of that comparatively numerous judicatory, without recourse to fraud in either of those or in any other shapes.

If a word was wanting, nobile officium served for everything.

5./2./ Not the facility: for by this time, the Common mind had advanced to[?] [...?] too high a state of maturity to afford a prospect of success to frauds of so gross a texture. The dawn of religious liberty had begun to give its vigour to the public mind. No imposture too gross concealed from detection by the combined force of interest and interest-begotten prejudice. The Priests of the Grand Laws[?] proclaim the immortality of their ever changing God. English Lawyers proclaim the innocence and meritoriousness of iniquity under the name of nullification, and of lying under the name of fiction.

6. The Roman Law &c

7. In the case of the Scottish judicatory the populousness of that judicatory, and the parties into which it was in consequence habitually divided, were of themselves circumstances sufficient to throw obstruction in the way of any persevering and consistent system of fraud and artifice. Devised by one party, a law would have been denounced as such and protected against by another.