28 Oct r 1807

L d Eldon's Bill

(│ │) (which have not been reviewed by the ... Division) more concisely and as effectually in the Lord President's 2 d Bill - "nor shall any appeal be allowed from interlocutors as decrees of an Ordinary, which have not been reviewed in the Inner House."

That any such appeal per saltum[?], as Lord Hale aptly calls it, +jurisdiction of the Lord's House, [...?], should ever have been allowed, seems indeed a most palpable incongruity: but as to the remedy, this assuredly, is no proper plan for it. In the House of Lords the oversight originated: to the House of Lords, if such be the pleasure of the House, to the House, by an /a standing/ Order of its own, its belongs to repair the oversight. This much as to the point of right: and in /as/ regards to practicability, if the House consents to do it by an Act, admitting into a participation of the power the two other branches of the legislature, can there be a doubt of its consenting to produce the same effect without need of any such surrender of existing privilege?

In speaking of the sort of leap in question in the character of incongruity, I speak merely in the way of relation, relation being had to the existing order of things. Abstraction made of that consideration, in my own view of Scottish judicature the Inner House is a nuisance, the judicatory of the Ordinaries the only judicatory that ought to be perceived /consequently/ the appeal consequently ought to come from them immediately to the House of Lords in every case. +

Supposing the appellant assured that the judgment of the Ordinary /Outer House/ would be applied[?] in the Inner House, one sees what a saving in the articles of delay and expence it could not but be - and thence what a relief upon the whole, to fly at once into the bosom of the House of Lords: and perhaps in that seat of supreme judicature, a too extensive attention to the relief thus afforded in this or that individual instance, may have been the cause that gave birth to the incongruous general rule.

+See Lett. i. p.│ │. See Letter v. p.│ │.