17 July 1807

Scotch Reform

(2) 19

2 o

Letter V

Ch.3. Bonâ fide Appeals

§. Review Chamber not better than Session

1. Is it on the score of the number of seats? The supreme judicature, the House of Lords excepted, in which such simplicity is impossible, Reason and Experience if the minute I have ventured to take of their judgment be correct, join in the decision in favour of number one: what in the character of an argumentum ad hominum[?] is much stronger in the learned Reformer's own plan the present number 15 is objected to as excessive, and as the trisection of that number is preferred to the bisection of it, not only 8 or 7 are preferred to 15, but 5 to 8 or 7.

2. Is it on the score of appropriate learning and practice as presumed from experience? Is it of the essence of the plan to committ the power of reversing or modifying a decision pronounced by those whose quantum of appropriate experience and practice stands at the highest pitch to those whose quantum of those endowments stands at some inferior pitch.

The Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer, (Bill p. 1o.[?]) has been conversant throughout the whole of his judicial life with the business of the Court of Exchequer. From this Court the practice of which is so perfectly familiar to him he is to pay occasional visits to another Court for the purpose of pronouncing whether a branch of jurisdiction with which at his first visit he has no acquaintance at all, and on each successive visit less than any of his Colleagues, has been rightly exercised by those whose experience in it is so much greater than his own.