16 May 1808

I. Reasons

Ch.V. Advantages

§.9./8./ Fiction ousted

In no one instance has a fiction ever been broached, but that in the conduct of the Judge who broached it, two species of guilt have been combined, the political guilt of usurpation, and the moral guilt of wilful falshood: always accompanied with usurpation, so far from operating as an extenuation of that offence, it has in every instance been a feature of aggravation added to it: it has been a species of swindling not commissible[?] in any other than that high station: obtaining power on false pretences: power in the foreground with money behind it in the back ground.

The mischievous consequences have not been confined to those produced by the usurpators[?]. Of the falshood by which the seat of judicature has been polluted the influence has been of the most disastrous kind as well to the public understanding as to the public morals.

To the public morals, by recommending from the highest authority, as a practice worthy of imitation, recommending by open practice, a mode of recommendation universally acknowledged to be so much more forcible and impressible and efficient than simple precept, the vice recommending and from this exalted station, and as it were sanctifying and canonizing the vice of lying, urging men thereby to the commission of all those wrongs for which by those to whom they have thus been instigated to the commission of them they are afterwards punished.

2. To the public understanding, by inculcating and causing so many gross and most pernicious errors, and this too on the part of a Judge, has been not only subservient, conducive, beneficial but for this length has imposture on the one side and infatuation on the other been carried but even necessary to justice.