17 Apr. 1807

Letter V

IV. Judges w.[?] malâ fide.

My Lord, for the extirpating of the breed of malâ fide Appellants, at no time can knowledge any more than power have been wanting to Judge and C o - at no time can any thing have been wanting but that which has been always wanting - and under the fee-gathering system can never cease to be wanting - interest, and will the offspring of interest. It is what every man - not to speak of women and children - knows, and what not even all their science can have enabled them compleatly to forget that what, in the main, it is a man's interest to do he will, in general, do - and what it is his interest not to do, he will not do.

What it was not possible therefore even for their learning to avoid knowing was - that a man who saw it to be his interest to become a malâ fide Appellant would in general be so: another thing it was equally impossible for them to avoid knowing was that to every man to whom delay was thus proffered[?] to be sold an interest in becoming a malâ fide appellant, and that a predominant and effective one was created by the vendors: that ... but to persevere in tracing out through all its several points their universal conscience would be but a waste of words.

Conscious of the disease created by the industry of their predecessors and kept up on foot by their own - intimately acquainted with the disease, intimately acquainted with the cause - it is equally impossible for these physicians of the body politic to avoid being equally acquainted with the remedies.