20 March 1808

Letter V

§.6. Reasons

Ends of Justice

Non-forthcomingness of Evidence

Causes

Factitious causes negative and positive

Factitious Causes Negative.

1. Want of an all comprehensive system of arrangements for obtaining spontaneous discovery of persons possessing the faculty of yielding verbal testimony, or having in their custody and power sources of real or written evidence.

2. Want of an all comprehensive system of investigatorial procedure extending to all suits, non-penal as well as penal: and applicable to the tracing out, from mouth to mouth and from hand to hand, of persons and things in the character of sources of evidence-testimonial, real and written evidence.

3. Where on the part of a thing the faculty of yielding real evidence, or, on the part of a person, the faculty of yielding evidence of any description, testimonial, real or written, is in danger of perishing, as by death, expatriation, exprovinciation, absconsion &c, before the time at which, in ordinary course, the evidence in question would be collected; want of an all-comprehensive system of arrangements for collecting in time, and thus preventing the deposition of it.

4. Want of an all-comprehensive system of arrangements for compelling forthcomingness on the part of persons, in the character of sources of evidence, for the purpose of oral examination, in cases in which that mode of collecting evidence is prudentially as well as physically practicable.

5. Want of d o for collecting evidence by epistolary examination when oral is physically or prudentially impracticable or insufficient.