1 June[?] 1807

Letter V

II. Proper Remedies

2. Costs, though as against delay as will be seen at large by no means in the present case an appropriate remedy - by no means an appropriate restraining check, as not unless by some accident, keeping par with the force of the generative impulse - will still act in restraint of factitious delay, in proportion to its magnitude.

In the anxiety to keep down the amount of the allowance made under the name of costs has accordingly composed another parcel of standing policy with the partnership.

Costs - putting upon the word a meaning not much different from that which is put upon it in technical practice - viz. the arrangement by which the party in the wrong is laid under the obligation of reimbursing to him in the right such money as the defence of his interest[?], or rendered it necessary for him to disburse in an arrangement which, without any other expression or abatement[?] than what may be suggested by the relative indigence of him at whose charge it should be made, is prescribed by common honesty at the suggestion of common sense.

To refuse this reimbursement to the plaintiff when the right is on his side - is to despoil him of his right and violate the engagements contracted by the sovereign in his character of the author of that article of the substan[tive] branch of the law by which he stood invested with that right: to despoil him of it - viz. in every instance in which the means necessary to be disbursed in pursuit of the right exceeds the value of it. In this case the effect of the refusal is to give encouragement pro[?] tanto[?] to dishonest men to inflict on their respective adversaries injuries in all imaginable shapes and to any amount not exceeding the expence necessary to be incurred for the chance of obtaining satisfaction at the hands of the Judge.