12 May 1808

I. Reasons

Ch.V.

§.12. Litigation prevented

In my expectations of seeing the diminution of litigation placed to the account of advantage by the arbiters of human destiny, I, the Petitioner, am for being sanguine. I mean the prevention of it by any such means as that in question: viz. by any such course as that of investing with the properties of cognoscibility and certainty to the rule of action and standard of obedience, of rendering the law certain, cognoscible and intelligible. For in the opposite modes I know there has never been, in any such quarter, any backwardness to contribute to the production of this effect: I speak of that plan of financial policy by the pursuit of which the door of justice has been so effectually shut against nine-tenths of the people, and the power of exercising oppression upon those nine parts thus vested in the hands of the tenth.

Uncertain whether this result will, at the bottom of men's minds, be placed to the account of profit or inconvenience, it would be in vain for one to dissemble that as this is among the effects the production of which would be laboured at with the greatest energy or is it among those which may be predicted with the most perfect confidence.

Throughout the whole of this business two opposite and irreconcileable interests are upon the carpet and at stake, the interest of the community at large in the character of persons liable to become suitors and clients, and the interest of that part of it, minute in bulk, but gigantic in power and influence, which is composed of lawyers of the several ranks and denominations. The most perfect comprehension of their own interest, as well as of the most promising means of pursuing it with effect is among the endowments of the favoured few: on the other side the most compleat ignorance of theirs, and that compleat inattention which is the natural consequence of so compleat an ignorance, is among the misfortunes of the many. In England more particularly, it has ever hitherto been their destiny to repose in these their natural and in great measure irreconcileable adversaries a degree of confidence exceeding even that which prudence would venture to bestow upon the nearest and surest friends.