PRIVATE

18 Apr. 1807

Letter V

III. Proper remedies

Of the precautions taken for the prevention of irreparable damage, by execution not withstanding Appeal, demand for the anxiety would naturally be intense and scrupulous in the inverse ratio of the dignity and responsibility of the Judge. In Scotland it would be stranger when looking to a distant Sheriff's Court than when looking to the High Metropolitan Court at Edinburgh. In England, it would have been stranger in a Sheriff's Court if these seats of undilatory and unvexatious justice had not been destroyed than when looking to the elevated and richly endowed seats of dilatory, ruinous and excruciating justice in the great Hall at Westminster.

Even in the remotest province of Scotland it is difficult to conceive a case in which the situation of a Judge probationed by a three years perseverance in the education and habits of an Advocate at Edinburgh should afford matter for serious apprehension of his lending his power to a malâ fide plaintiff to enable law to work irreparable damage in contempt or by abuse of any such powers as the providence of a legislator should have committed to him in conjunction with the appropriate obligations to the express end of preventing any such damage.

But that any such abuse should be likely to find a hand disposed and able to committ it, either in the Court of Justice or in any Court at Westminster Hall - and that the danger of such abuse from such a quarter should be serious enough to warrant the refusing to any of these high Courts the requisite power for giving a provisional execution to their own judgments, while appeals from those judgments were in pending, is a suspicion which even to those whose opinion of them is least favourable, must surely present itself as altogether groundless and extravagant.