26 April 1807

Letter V

VI. Bail baiting

III. Perjury

In the heat of the struggle between contending interests, what rents do we not see sometimes made in the veil of confederated prudence, what confessions do not we see break out!

The Repost of the Family of Advocates lies now before me. The Scottish technical procedure - in the procedure of the Court of Session "no other mode of taking proof has" ... "for more than a century" ... been known in "that Court"... than one which "affords daily encouragement to the grossest perjury." - (and by this[?] a combination of causes the necessary efficacy of which is therein compleatly demonstrated: for the mode is little less favourable to that result than the mode pursued under English Equity) - It is by the Judges of that Court - and for their own personal accommodation, in their separate character of Lord Ordinaries, that "this practice has been silently, though compleatly introduced." "In 1532, those of the Judges were deputed weekly, for the examination of witnesses:... this practice continued down to the year 1686." Oppressed by the burthen their learned Lordships about that time took heart[?] of grace[?], and easing themselves of two thirds of it, took it singly by rotation in the character of Lord Ordinaries: accordingly for the purpose of this function, separated from which all other functions of judicature are - not administration of justice, but mocking of justice - for the purpose of this vital function "one Ordinary is still appointed," but it is now only " pro formâ: his function having under the mantle of that silence, so religiously observed by the authors of the iniquity, and which the sufferers by it durst never break, undergoes that metamorphosis which all functions would undergo of course, if it depended upon the functionaries - having been converted, I mean, into a sine-cure.