e
hazard of my life or the sweat of my brow? The grave doctor answers me
in the affirmative; the reverend serjeant replies in the negative; the
learned barrister reasons upon one side and upon the other, and
concludes nothing. What shall I do? An antagonist starts up and presses
me hard. I enter the field, and retain these three persons to defend my
cause. My cause, which two farmers from the plough could have decided in
half an hour, takes the court twenty years. I am however at the end of
my labor, and have in reward for all my toil and vexation a judgment in
my favor. But hold--a sagacious commander, in the adversary's army, has
found a flaw in the proceeding. My triumph is turned into mourning. I
have used _or_, instead of _and_, or some mistake, small in appearance,
but dreadful in its consequences; and have the whole of my success
quashed in a writ of error. I remove my suit; I shift from court to
court; I fly from equity to law, and from law to equity; equal
uncertainty attends me everywhere; and a mistake in which I had no
share, decides at once upon my liberty and property, sending me from the
court to a prison, and adjudging my family to beggary and famine. I am
innocent, gentlemen, of the darkness and uncertainty of your science. I
never darkened it with absurd and contradictory notions, nor confounded
it with chicane and sophistry. You have excluded me from any share in
the conduct of my own cause; the science was too deep for me; I
acknowledged it; but it was too deep even for yourselves: you have made
the way so intricate, that you are yourselves lost in it; you err, and
you punish me for your errors.

The delay of the law is, your lordship will tell me, a trite topic, and
which of its abuses have not been too severely felt not to be complained
of? A man's property is to serve for the purposes of his support; and
therefore, to delay a determination concerning that, is the worst
injustice, because it cuts off the very end and purpose for which I
applied to the judicature for relief. Quite contrary in the case of a
man's life; there the determination can hardly be too much protracted.
Mistakes in this case are as often fallen into as many other; and if the
judgment is sudden, the mistakes are the most irretrievable of all
others. Of this the gentlemen of the robe are themselves sensible, and
they have brought it into a maxim. _De morte hominis nulla est cunctatio
longa._ But what could have induced them to r