12 Feb y 1807

Letter IV

Resolut 6.7.8.9

Juries

Lawyers fondness

It remains for me to submitt to Your Lordship what the cause is of the fondness shewn for this institution, even its present deformity /even under its present deformed shape/, by the Lawyers: by the people, at least by thinking people of all classes /in general/.

My Lord, they suck it in with their mother's milk: they take it with their pap from the hands of Nurse Blackstone. Is it necessary to state why Mahometans are fond of Mahometonism?

No institution how purely soever absurd and wreckeded, no institution to /for/ which authority is not of itself sufficient to secure in attachment; much more where the institution having an intrinsic virtue, rendered pernicious only by an extrinsic circumstance - the mode of its application, Authority if questioned, can never be without Reason for her support.

In criminal cases, the utility of Jury trial /in point of utility in point of security/ stands on stronger, still stronger grounds than in civil cases: but in England nothing calling upon the people to make the distinction, they do not make the distinction of themselves, still less are lawyers to whom it is of use in all cases, disposed to make it for them.

Thus it is that lawyers and non-lawyers and lawyer learned and unlearned, and learned dupes /imposters/ and duped /deceivers and deceived/ agree in their fondness for this instrument of oppression and injustice, (I speak of it in its present state, grafted as it is in technical instead of natural procedure) for this instrument of injustice, [...?] for different and even opposite reasons: non-lawyers because for want of that discrimination which has been rendered impossible to them, they believe it to be, in its present state subservient to the ends of justice: lawyers, because without any such discrimination as would to them would be worse than useless, they feel it to be so universally subservient to the ends of judicature.