NO. 1.
APPENDIX.
131
a discretionary power of ordering other trials and the fulfilling of other conditions than those specially annexed by Act of Parliament to the reward;[1] an exposition of the law, which I ever did and ever shall (until it is supported by legal authority) totally reject and refuse obedience to; for I do maintain, that before passing the last Act of Parliament I had as full and perfect a right to the reward of £20,000 as any freeholder in Britain has to his estate; and I never would have desired nor ever will desire any better satisfaction than a judicial determination of that point; which however it was very soon thought
- ↑ In a note he asks, "If this interpretation of the Act was true, and the Commissioners had a general discretionary power, where was the reason or use of specifying any trial at all in the original Act?" There would have been no occasion to ask a question involving a paradox, had the real state of these concerns, which the public never had the slightest knowledge of, been brought forward. The Commissioners, when they authorized their colleague. Lord Morton, to supersede the 12th of Queen Anne, after, and not before the success of the Timekeeper, by procuring an Act to embody his own ideas, which included the ruin of the Claimant, as far as he could effect it, were as grossly deficient in common care as if they had decided the question by a toss up of heads or tails. It has been shown that they never enquired into the real state of affairs under the separate Commission, where the vengeful misgivings of this philosopher by experiment originated, and from this novel and important item remaining unknown, a false view of the case has always been unintentionally given by those who have treated of the transactions between the Claimant and the Board of Longitude, after the return from Barbadoes.
