19 May 1807

+ + 7

Letter V

I. Plan

2. Abolition of Appeal against Interlocutors, - a remedy from which the remedial tendency is precarious, the pernicious boundless. A postulate assumed in it, is a natural, clear, and unpassable line of distinction and demarcation - drawn or at pleasure capable of being drawn, between interlocutory judgments and final ones. On this head, my humble conception of the matter, is - as Your Lordship will see, that no such line has ever yet been drawn - that no such line was in a way to be drawn by the hand of Your Lordship's learned Adviser, or any other learned hand: and thus that the prohibition of Appeals against Interlocutors would sometimes amount to nothing, producing nothing but that litigation which it professes to prevent - at other times to worse than nothing, operating as a prohibition of Appeals against judgments, interlocutory in name, but final in effect, and thus undermining and reducing to inanity, as far as that one of the three kingdoms is concerned, the superintending judicial authority of the House of Lords, and the legislative authority, of the imperial legislature of which it is a branch. But of this too in its place.

Your Lordship will scarcely, I believe, suppose that if, in my humble view of the matter, the mischief ended in the voluntary surrender of a part of the exercise, if mere honorific privilege, forming one of the feathers in the cap of an aristocratical assembly, it would form[?], in my estimation, any very serious objection to the measure.

But, my Lord in the privileges to which I allude, as well as in the prerogatives of the Crown, I behold a valuable part of the inheritance of the people: and whatsoever sacrifices Your Lordship's generosity, in your character of a Lord of Parliament, may have reconciled you to the making of in this shape, I, a poor Commoner, intervening and praying to be heard pro interessi meo[?], can not reconcile myself to the seeing of them made.