nd [wm 1794]

Coin

5

In the description of the offence for the purpose prohibition, punishment, and other operations subservient to the object /purpose/ of prevention it will be necessary or at least advantageous to the legislator to include on the one hand the whole assemblage of the different descriptions of persons that on any occasion may come to be concerned – in the production of the obnoxious effect. this may be endeavoured either 1 by generic terms sufficiently comprehensive or by specific terms sufficiently numerous and precise. Neither of these expedients are to be neglected: the latter is useful for facility of intelligence: the former for permanence of effect. The latter will be the work of history; the former, of genius. Observation and memory will be the faculties employd in the description of the latter: imagination, in the description of the former. Specification must comprize every thing that has been done: Generic notation every thing that either has been done or can be done. Specification is necessary for the information of the delinquent, that he may see beyond a doubt that his case has been provided for and that in case of his perseverance in deliquency the hand of the law will reach: it is also necessary /nor is it altogether unnecessary/ for the information of the Judge (it is the more necessary in proportion to the weakness of his intellectual faculties[)], that he may have be forearmed against all doubts with regard to the real intention and true interpretation of the law. But were it only with /had the necessity of it no other/ reference to the person exposed to the temptation of falling into delinquency that the demand for specification had place this would be sufficient to prescribe the use of it: for avail[?] at one[?] and impotent is that law which wants any of the necessary means for conveying to the knowledge of any one of those whose conduct it is designed to guide.