16 May 1807

Scotch Reform

Letter VI

Letter VI

V. Authoritative Plans

On this plan I see the advantage of comparative simplicity over factitious and useless complication.

Two Presidents struck off, useless beings, good for nothing but to east extra Salaries, and elbow the Lord President who desires to see no such upstarts.

Two extraordinary Lords also struck off, worse than useless beings Vampires raised from the grave, to suck the blood of the people, and to frighten learned Memorialists into fits.

Here to [...?] good purpose would be a greater inovation - a greater violation of the Union - which the only persons who seem either interested /or to possess the interest or desperation[?] /propensity// to set up their cries, are estopped from setting up either of them /have put the gagg into their own mouths/. (An estopped, my Lord! ask my Lord Chief Justice, and my Lord, now alas! EX Chancellor, whether it be not a good one.)

As to the extraordinary Lords, if the design be /was/ that one of them should be a foreigner (to a Scotch lawyer an Englishman is a foreigner) I can not help looking upon that part of the plan as beneficial, so far as it goes, and for exactly the same reasons that have always taught me to regard the admixture of /correspondent occasional/ foreigners (I mean men of Scottish birth and education) as beneficent in a high degree to English judicature. But in this advantage to make the most of it, I should never think of seeing any thing like an equivalent for the certain and palpable mischiefs attendant in the proposed Chamber of Review.