of acquiescence—a prospect first presented by hope, since realized over and over again by experience. It is too much to expect of a man of finance, that he should anticipate the feelings of unknown individuals: it is a great deal if he will listen to their cries. Taxes on consumption fall on bodies of men: the most inconsiderable one when touched will make the whole country ring again. The oppressed and ruined objects of the taxes on justice, weep in holes and corners, as rats die: no one voice finds any other to join with it.
A tax on shops, a tax on tobacco, falls upon a man, if at all, immediately, and presses on him constantly:—every man knows whether he keeps or means to keep a shop, whether he means to sell or to use tobacco. A tax on justice falls upon a man only occasionally: it is like a thunder-stroke, which a man never looks for till he is destroyed by it. He does not know when it will fall on him, or whether it ever will: nor even whether, when it does fall, it will press upon him most, or upon his adversary. He knows not what it will amount to: he has no data from which to calculate it: it comes lumped to him in the general mass of law charges: a heap of items among which no vulgar eye can ever hope to discriminate: an object on which investigation would be thrown away, as comprehension is impossible. Calamities that are not to be averted by thought, are little thought of, and it is best not to think of them. When is the time for complaint? Before the thunder-bolt is fallen it would be too soon: when fallen, it is too late. Shopkeepers, tobacconists, glovers, are compact bodies—they can arm counsel—they come in force to the House of Commons. Suitors for justice have no common cause, and scarce a common name: they are every body and nobody—their business being every body's is nobody's. Who are suitors? where are they? what does a Chancellor of the Exchequer care for them? what can they do to help him? what can they do to hurt him? So far from having a common interest, they have a repugnant interest: to crush the injured, is to befriend the injurer.
May not ignorance with regard to the quantum and the source of the grievance, have contributed something to patience?—Unable to pierce the veil of darkness, that guards from vulgar eyes the avenues of justice, men know not how much of the difficulty of the approach is to be ascribed to art, and how much to nature. As the consumers of tobacco confound the tax on that commodity with the price, so those who borrow or would have wished to borrow the hand of justice, confound the artificial with the natural expense of hiring it. But if the whole of the grievance be natural, it may be all inevitable and incurable, and at any rate it may be no more the fault of lawyers or law makers, than gout and stone are of physicians.—Happy ignorance!—if blindness to the cause of a malady could blunt the pain of it!
There want not apologists-general and talkers in the air, to prove to us that this as well as every thing else, is as it should be. The expense, the delay, and all the other grievances, which activity has heaped up, or negligence suffered to accumulate, are the prices which, according to Montesquieu, we must be content to pay for liberty and justice. A penny is the price men pay for a penny loaf: therefore why not two-pence? and, if three-pence, there would be no harm done, since the loaf would be worth so much the more.
May not a sort of instinctive fellow-feeling among the wealthy have contributed something, if not to the imposition, at least to the acquiescence? It is the wealthy alone, that either by fortune, situation, education, intelligence, or influence, are qualified to take the lead in legislation: and the characteristic property of this tax, is to be favourable to the wealthy, and that in proportion to their wealth. Other taxes afford a man no indemnification for the wealth they take from him: this gives him power in exchange. The power of keeping down those who are to be kept down, the power of doing wrong, and the more generous pride of abstaining from the wrong which it is in our power to do; advantages such as these, are too precious not to be grasped at with avidity by human weakness: and, as in a country of political liberty, and under a system of justice in other respects impartial, they can only be obtained by a blind and indirect route such as this, the inconvenience of travelling in it, finds on the part of those who are well equipped for it, the more patient an acquiescence.
Will it be said that abolishing the taxes on justice would not answer the purpose, for that supposing them all abolished, justice would still remain inaccessible to the body of the people?—This would be to justify one abuse by another. The other obstacles by which the avenues to justice have been blocked up, constitute a separate head of abuse, from which I gladly turn aside, as being foreign to the present purpose. Take off law taxes all together, the number of those to whom justice will still remain inaccessible, would still, it must be confessed, be but too great. It would however not be so great, as it is at present under the pressure of those taxes. Though you could not tell exactly to how many you would open the doors of justice, you might be sure you opened them to some. Though you would still leave the burthen but too heavy, you would at any rate make it proportionably more supportable.
