1823 Feb y. 28.

Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles.

Judiciary resumed

In every Judicial District, there will, in the most prosperous state of human nature, be but too many who, being by the inaptitude opposite to appropriate intellectual and appropriate active aptitude, laid under an incapacity of giving adequate support to their own cause, even on the supposition of the justice of it, will be at the same time lying under the inability of finding, if ever, in sufficient time, an adequate gratuitous advocate. For persons thus situated, there seems an indispensable necessity of providing a pair of official advocates, one for each side of the cause. Call the one the pursuer's advocate general: call the other, the defender's advocate General. On the part of The Judge, no degree of appropriate aptitude in all its branches that in his place can be realized or so much as imagined, can supersede altogether the demand for assistance in those other shapes. In causes of the simplest nature, yes: but in causes of a certain degree of complexity, no: in this or that instance, a necessity will arise for such communication and such arrangement of Documents as the time of the Judge could not suffice for. Moreover, the inexorable and predetermined impartiality of the Judge would scarcely be compatible with the reception of that unrestrained confidence, of which the case of a party, how compleatly soever in the right, may occasionally have need. By the single-seatedness of every Judicatory as contrasted with the many-seatedness so generally established - by this single-seatedness, combined with the gratuitousness of the service rendered by deputies, room will be left for reconciling the allotment of sufficient salaries to these two subsidiary functionaries, with a reduction in the expence of the whole of the establishment, as compared with that with which it would be charged by hitherto-established usage. To these two functionaries should also be given the power of appointing unpaid deputies: neither in these situations, any more than in that of Judge, is man exempt from sickness. To the faculty of enlarging and contracting itself as need requires, may be given the appellation of elasticity: needful as is this quality, never till Bentham wrote did any such conception as that of planting it in the Judicial Establishment, enter into the head of any as yet known publicist.

Proper