3 March 1808

40

Letter V

§.4. Reasons

2. As little can I take upon me to recommend the practice or a precedent of the course proper to be taken in the collection and preparation of the facts or other considerations brought to view in the character of reasons.

In the case of a mass of statute law, ere yet the proposed law has been ventured to be introduced into either House, each House has frequently its Committee occupied for weeks or months in the collection of facts which when brought together and generalized, are to furnish, in debate at least, the matter of reasons.

The declarers of Jurisprudential law, exercising those attributes of omniscience and infallibility with which the curtesy of lay-gents[?] has invested them, turn aside with generous disdain all such tedious courses, such superfluous and frivolous inquiries. On the question about the slave trade, years not weeks were employed, a library not a volume was collected, by unlearned legislators: a dictum out of Littleton or L d Coke, distilled or presumed to have been distilled from some assignable or unassignable decision or decisions, would have sufficed for giving a decision on this as on any other subject to the King's Bench or Common Pleas.