29 Feb y 1808

Letter VI

Omissa & Facienda

No allegat Sans Oath

Under no oath[?] [...?...?] but English practice if no[?] examination of parties.

2. The other mischief consists in the corruption of morals: deprivation of moral character both in this part /instance/ of the client - that is of the number of the community in general in the character of suitors - and on the part of the man of law. Both are thus rendered liars: the one by accident , the other by profession: the one by misfortune, the other by choice.

There is no enormity[?] to which men are not recounted by practice.

Never was wickedness more compleatly destitute of all excuses on the ground of necessity. The licence is not extended to extraneous witnesses. But there is no reason why a man should be permitted to lie[?] in the character of a party [...?...?] of a witness.

The mischief would be much less serious than it is, if the habitual practice of this vice were confined to professional lawyers, the humbug representations of the parties: that is if in every instance the man who is once a professional lawyer were always a professional lawyer, and nothing else.

But the same man who in the certain part of his life is a professional lawyer, becomes in the latter part of it an official lawyer, and in that character is raised to the highest and most important trusts[?]: and going through the course of vice is ever rendered an indispensable qualification, a condition [...?] quâ [...?], to his elevation to any of those exalted stations: not less rational would it be or favourable to virtue[?], if a law were made rendering it impossible for a female to enter upon the matrimonial state, without having previously passed here[?] in two years of her life in a brothel.