CHAPTER XL. P. I.
REMARKS ON THE ART OF VERBOSITY. A RULE OF COCCEIUS, AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE LANGUAGE AND PRACTICE OF THE LAW.
If they which employ their labour and travail about the public administration of justice, follow it only as a trade, with unquenchable and unconscionable thirst of gain, being not in heart persuaded that justice is God's own work, and themselves his agents in this business,—the sentence, of right, God's own verdict, and themselves his priests to deliver it; formalities of justice do but serve to smother right; and that which was necessarily ordained for the common good, is through shameful abuse made the cause of common misery.
HOOKER.
Reader, thou mayest perhaps have thought me at times disposed to be circumambagious in my manner of narration. But now, having cast thine eyes over the Doncaster charters, even in the abridged form in which I have considerately presented them, thou knowest what a round-about style is when amplified with all possible varieties of professional tautology.
You may hear it exemplified to a certain degree, in most sermons of the current standard, whether composed by those who inflict them upon their congregation, or purchased ready made and warranted orthodox as well as original. In a still greater degree you may hear it in the extempore prayers of any meeting-house, and in those with which the so-called Evangelical Clergymen of the Establishment think proper sometimes to prologize and epilogize their grievous discourses. But in tautology the Lawyers beat the Divines hollow.
Cocceius laid it down as a fundamental rule of interpretation in theology, that the words and phrases of scripture are to be understood in every sense of which they are susceptible; that is, that they actually signify every thing that they can possibly signify. The Lawyers carry this rule farther in their profession than the Leyden Professor did in his: they deduce from words not only every thing that they can possibly signify, but sometimes a great deal more; and sometimes they make them bear a signification precisely opposite to what they were intended to express.
That crafty politician who said the use of language is to conceal our thoughts, did not go farther in his theory, than the members of the legal profession in their practice; as every deed which comes from their hands may testify, and every Court of Law bears record. You employ them to express your meaning in a deed of conveyance, a marriage settlement, or a will; and they so smother it with words, so envelope it with technicalities, so bury it beneath redundancies of speech, that any meaning which is sought for may be picked out, to the confusion of that which you intended. Something at length comes to be contested: you go to a Court of Law to demand your right; or you are summoned into one to defend it. You ask for justice, and you receive a nice distinction—a forced construction,—a verbal criticism. By such means you are defeated and plundered in a civil cause; and in a criminal one a slip of the pen in the indictment brings off the criminal scot free. As if slips of the pen in such cases were always accidental! But because Judges are incorruptible, (as blessed be God they still are in this most corrupt nation) and because Barristers are not to be suspected of ever intentionally betraying the cause which they are fee'd to defend, it is taken for granted that the same incorruptibility, and the same principled integrity, or gentlemanly sense of honor which sometimes is its substitute, are to be found among all those persons who pass their miserable lives in quill-driving, day after day, from morning till night, at a scrivener's desk, or in an attorney's office!
