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78. In reference to the punishment of a jury that had tossed up for a verdict, the judges are torturers who compel men, by torture, to declare as their own the opinions they do not hold. Having, in their own instance, cast off sincerity as a habit incompatible with their profession and their office, they punish every symptom of it in others.'

426. The assumed character of the lawyer is that of physician-the real one, that of poisoner general. The particular personifications under which they work their diversity of mischief are almost infinite; more than the tricks of a Proteus, or the transmigrations of all Pythagoras's school.'

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1. v. 506. They are accomplices. A man has committed a theft-all accomplices, but one, that assist him in his escape, are punished. Strange; what the non-advocate is hanged for, the advocate is paid for and admired.'

508. They are sellers of indulgences for crimes, under the sophism that the judge is counsel for the prisoner: that being the lying spirit sent forth, on this occasion, to deceive the people. 552. They are gorgers of the promiscuous spoil of creditors and debtors, the accumulated pittances of the distressed. 561. On the establishment of any thing similar to the Danish reconciliation offices; lawyers, official and professional, are a flock of half-starved wolves, at the time a sheep is rescued by the shepherd from their fangs.'

2. v. 191. They are domino-sellers for legal masquerades. Depositions in the third person, "this deponent sayeth," &c. being a commodious dress for a dishonest wearer, as well as for the tailor, who has the making of it—not a fool's, but a sort of knave's coat-a wrap-rascal-an habiliment manufactured for every suitor, and sold to him, at a masquerade price, by his lawyer.'

197. They are a partnership of leeches, of whom different orders, from the attorney upwards, are fastened iniquitously on a client. 200. The advocate is a shark; the judge, with a sword, called the sword of justice, in his hand, forces the suitor into his mouth.' 205. Next, they are cuttle fish—the fish, which to blind and confound its pursuers, deluges with a flood of ink the medium in which it moves. 205. The special pleader and the equity draughtsman might interplead at the herald's office for the privilege of taking for an armorial bearing this original manufacturer of troubled waters. 216. They soon rise up as metaphysical tinkers and shoemakers; with this difference from the real one, that no shoemaker finds a judge disposed to support him in making bad shoes-whereas every advocate finds a judge disposed to support him in making bad bills.'

284. They are players who sometimes forget to act their part (to look and talk moral) on the theatre of justice-thus judges wink to each other and to the bar, whilst perjured affidavits are reading, and treat it as a good joke. It appears, however, that while judges are men as well as players-such must be the consequence of affidavit evidence.'

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306. They are manufacturers of a chaos of fraud and imbecility; according as the fraud and imbecility are more complete, they derive from their accomplices and dupes the praise of ingenuity and science.'

297. They are idolators: not only (together with others) worshippers of a jury-the idol with twelve heads; 586. but of an idol of their own creation, which they bedaub with praise, and to which they compel obedience-the nonentity of the common law. The Baal to whom this priesthood bow the knee, they have taught the people to worship as the true God.'

475. They are dog-trainers. When a man has a deg to teach, he falls upon him and beats him; the animal takes note of the circumstances in which he has been beaten, and the intimation thus received becomes in the mind of the dog a rule of common law! So men are punished like dogs, with a rod of fictions and unpromulgated common laws; they are beaten without mercy; and out of one man's beating, another man is left to derive instruction as he can. Lawyers are worse than Nebuchadnezzar, and require of all mankind to divine not merely the meaning of their dream, but the very dream itself.'

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492. They are conquerors, whose footsteps are marked by ruin. They are brokers that offer premiums for corruption. 573. They are schoolmasters to teach injustice; of which the law of evidence is a great school, and of which every rule and maxim comes out a lesson of injustice.'

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629. They are savages waiting for a wreck, or rather insurers making secret preparations for the manufacturing of one; inasmuch as they have not brought within the notice and the means of every individual the species of evidence which they may require to prove judicially, every fact in which he may happen to be concerned."

5. v. 177. The savage is mild and placable compared with the English lawyer, the corrupter of blood and language.'

4. v. 639. The judges are slave-dealers, and the insolvent debtors are their slaves; the King's Bench prison being a Guinea trader, and the long vacation the long passage.'

5. v. 11. The judges are lottery-keepers, on a plan such as Mr Bish and Lord Bexley never thought of.'

29.They are psychological epicures one day, and carrion feeders the next. The judges, who elsewhere refuse evidence subject to the slightest taint, insist upon its being served up to themselves in the corrupted state of affidavits.'

202. They are doctors, who propagate in the body politic the vermin which they are afterwards to remove, imitating their subordinate officers, who will not fasten upon a pilferer till he has ripened to a burglar, or take a prisoner at L.10, who by a little forbearance might have yielded L.40. Just as among renters of fish-ponds, it would be bad husbandry to take a pike of five pound weight out of a pond in which he might have thriven on to ten pound.'

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246. They are long-robed instruments and hawks; who introduced depositions instead of vivâ voce examinations into the Star Chamber, for their own profits. The royal falconer, after a prolongation of the sport, got his prey; the hawks were rewarded with their portion of the entrails.'

298. They are seedsmen. The origin of affidavits and depositions is, that they make business and pullulate with fees. Instead of examining the parties in the presence of each other and the judge, they set them to fight with affidavits manufactured by attorneys; affidavits are the seed, perjuries and fees, like ryegrass and clover, spring up together.'

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559. They are automatons, only awakened by the chink of fresh fees, and whose decisions are determined, not by any account of human feelings, but by lapse of time. They should be made not by the King, but by artisans in clock-work and in steam-engines, as many as Westminster-Hall can hold, in addition to the four by which for so many ages past it has been enlightened and adorned; where they manifest their conscience by the mechanical signature of judgments with shut doors; while the parties, unheard and unthought of, are for their benefit paying their way through the surrounding offices, like half-starved flies crawling through a row of spiders.'

4. v. 47. They are shopkeepers and fishwives. When the original universal shop (the aula Regis) was broken up into four great shops, no contrivance, no wickedness, was spared by the competitors for judicial custom; and the brethren at last parted, like two fishwives, each with a handful of the spoils of her antagonist in her hand.'

130. They are spiders. Under the natural system of zoological economy, spider devours spider for want of flies; under the technical system of procedure, judge, give him time and power, swallows up judge. Thus devoured by the metropolitan courts, the county court exists only in name; it is as the shell

of the fly, which, after having been sucked by the spider, is sometimes seen flittering in the web.'

350. Common law and equity are depredators, who sometimes hunt in couples; one knocks a man into the kennel, the other, whilst he pretends to help him up, picks his pocket. They are also dwarf and giant. Injunctions are a second suit, and that an equity suit, piled upon a first. The common law suit is a dwarf; the equity suit, a giant mounted upon his shoulders. The whole trade is now consolidated into one vast firm, and all interests mixed together and rendered undistinguishable. The pound of flesh on one side, or the pound of flesh on the other! such, when the flesh of suitors is concerned, is the alternative given by the man of law. When the two sets of courts were at daggers drawn, the suitors were crushed by their collision; for a century and a half they have been on the best terms, and the suitor, who, instead of one court, is dragged through two, has suffered by their confederacy. Discordia pestis, concordia exitum. Ages ago, like Lockit and Peachum, they shook hands and embraced, and have ever since been playing into each other's hands. When one has picked the bones, the other sucks the marrow. When my Lord Chief Justice has had his pickings upon the error, how is he the poorer, if the bones of the cause go to be picked on the other side the passage? One day out of twenty, a fit of daintiness takes my Lord Chancellor; he won't try the cause, not he, for this time, without proper evidence! and so the mess goes over the way; an issue is sent to be tried by my Lord Chief Justice, with as polite a grace as if it were a slice of venison. 317. Judges at once, both of common law and equity, like the Barons of the Exchequer, with two sets of ears to hear, the longer ones for equity-two voices, with a falsetto for Chancery, are monsters such as Africa never disgorged, or Pidcock showed; double-faced and double-feed, with two half-consciences, whose surfaces have no more communication between them than the plus and minus side of the Leyden phial-the equity conscience asleep, whilst the common law conscience is spinning out delays, and picking up its fees.'

Such are specimens of the style that Mr Bentham has adopted in a work full of minute and elaborate disquisition; the labour of a life for the edification of posterity. They form as unsuitable ornaments as the grinning faces and burlesque forms with which the monkish builders have studded our magnificent cathedrals; and surely, in any lucid interval, the dropping a curtain over paroxysms like these ought not to be esteemed a sacrifice (744) to the humour of a day, in a work which, if

'true or useful for a moment, will be so as long as there are 'men!'

A great majority of the personal imputations showered down upon judge-made law is derived from the epithet of fee-fed judges. Now, is there any man, at all conversant with its history, who can persuade himself that the real blots in our system are in those points which can be rationally referred to the variance between the law as it stands at present, and the law as it would have been, if the judges had been otherwise remunerated? Whilst the reasons for making the payment of services depend in some degree on the amount of services performed are so palpable, that Mr Bentham himself states them, and Mr Brougham seems even at present to be among those who are unwilling to part with the principle altogether. But, at all events, now that the judges' salaries are no longer paid by fees, it might be hoped, all would go on right. No such thing. Unfortunately, it is too late for the judges to be reformed.

4. v. 472. Present judges profit by the perfect system of misrule introduced in former times. For as no man ought to be wiser than the laws, so no judge ought to be more honest than his predecessor! In the time of Henry VI. when judges wanted money, they used to fix upon any man that came uppermost, and, converting him into an outlaw, sell what he had, and put the money into their pockets. At present the legal partnership get only a share; but what they get, they digest at their ease under the shade of law. Their duty is to preserve existing rules, and existing rules were made that justice might not be done.'

It would be curious in the work of any other writer to find, that, in the same breath in which Mr Bentham is stating the appearance of such a book as his own as a sort of miracle, he yet denounces lawyers as rogues or fools for not having carried all its suggestions into execution long ago. Every existing rule in contradiction with these suggestions is reduced to a similar alternative. And the judges themselves can never have furnished as many splendid instances of (what is perhaps justly thought their most frequent error) confining all their attention to the evils on one side. He is convinced that the refusal, in an action between two persons, to try a collateral issue, affecting a third person only, sc. a witness, is merely a lawyer's rule to secure a new action and new fees! He has made out for himself, with the same facility, the history by which evidence taken out of the presence of the court, has passed, in Chancery, from the court to the master, and then from the master's office to the examiner's. The sole reason, it seems, why the para

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