This is he that is called an _honest attorney_! How much honester is a pick-pocket?
But there is a magistrate whose peculiar office it is, to redress the injured and oppressed. Go then and make trial of this remedy; Go, and tell your case to the _Lord Chancellor_. Hold; you must go on regularly: you must tell him your case, _in form of law_, or not ♦at all. You must therefore _file a bill_ in chancery, and _retain_ a lawyer belonging to that court. “But ♠you have already spent all you have; you have _no money_.” Then I fear you will have _no justice_. You stumble at the threshold. If you have either lost or spent all, your cause is naught: it will not even come to a hearing. So, if the oppressor has secured all that you had, he is as safe as if you was under the earth.
♦ “at” inserted per Errata
♠ “ye” replaced with “you” per Errata
* 21. Now what an amazing thing is this! The very _greatness_ of the villainy makes it beyond _redress_!――――But suppose he that is opprest, has some substance left, and can go through all the courts of justice, what parallel can we find among _Jews_, _Turks_, or _Heathens_, for either the delays or the expence attending it? With regard to the former, how monstrous is it, that in a suit relating to that inheritance, which is to furnish you and your family with food and raiment, you must wait month after month, perhaps year after year, before it is determined, whether it be yours or not? And what are you to _eat_, or to _wear_ in the mean time? Of that the court takes no cognizance! Is not this very _delay_, (suppose there were no other grievance attending the _English_ course of law) wrong beyond all expression? Contrary to all sense, reason, justice and equity? A _capital_ cause is tried in one day, and finally decided at once. And, _is the life_ less than _meat_? _Or the body_ of less concern _than raiment_? What a shameless mockery of justice then, is this putting off _pecuniary_ causes from term to term, yea, from year to year.
* With regard to the latter. A man has wronged me of a hundred pounds. I appeal to a judge for the recovery of it. How astonishing is it, that this judge himself cannot give me what is my right, and what evidently appears so to be, unless I first give, perhaps one half of the sum, to men I never saw before in my life!
22. I have hitherto supposed, that all causes when they are decided, are decided according to justice and equity. But is it so? Ye learned in the law, is no _unjust sentence_ given in your courts? Have not the same causes been decided quite opposite ways? One way, this term, just the contrary, the next? Perhaps one way in the morning (this I remember an instance of) and another way in the afternoon. How is this? Is there no _justice_ left on earth? No regard for right or wrong? Or have causes been puzzled so long, that you know not now, what is either wrong or right? What is agreeable to law, or contrary to it? I have heard some of you frankly declare, that it is in many cases next impossible to know, what is law, and what is not. So are your _folio_’s of law multiplied upon you, that no human brain is able to contain them: no; nor any consistent scheme, or abstract of them all.
But is it really owing to _ignorance_ of the law, (this is the most _favourable_ supposition) that so few of you scruple _taking fees_ on either side, of almost any cause that can be conceived? And that you generally plead in the manner you do on any side of any cause? Rambling to and fro, in a way so abhorrent from common sense, and so utterly foreign to the question? I have been amazed at hearing the pleadings of some eminent council: and when it has fallen out that the pleader on the other side understood only the common rules of logic, he has made those eminent men appear, either such egregious knaves, if they could help it, or such egregious blockheads, if they could not, that one would have believed they would shew their face there no more.――――Mean time, if there be a God that judgeth righteously, what horrid insults upon him are these! _Shall I not visit for these things, saith the Lord? Shall not my soul be avenged of such a nation as this!_