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LARCENY. Deer 4
of the shortest in the Book of any since the Reformation nor does it will it be found to contain above 5 or 6 times as many words as
[are necessary] the Law should unawares be rendered simple & intelligible, it takes special superfluous care
in a clause on purpose, that it shall not be deemed to have cut off an atom
of all that there is before it. While This if it had stood single
[might have rendered] the
Law might have been [on the point tolerably]
simple. It might have had
[stood a chance for being] known
and understood: to present This
would have been out of rule:
accordingly a special clause
is anxiously put in to keep
every little of what had gone
before alive.
This Statute, pressing this in the very same session upon the heels of another composed by the Legislature under very different
Ideas, seems rather extorted from their impatience, than directed by their judgement
nor is their anxiety to keep all former provisions on foot to be well accounted for
from on any other supposition design than this, that under any moderate tolerable state of the distinguished
men should rather have recourse to some of the other milder (and as it seems to have appeared
to them) more commensurate remedies.
+ 9. Geo. 1st. 22. The Black Act continued by 6th
12. Geo. 1stc. §: 6th G. 2. c. .§. .
10th Geo. 2d c. .§. . 17 G. 2. c. . §. . &
24 G. 2. c. §. . & at length perpetuated
by 31.G.2d.c. 42. §2.
All these misgivings if any such were felt were at length pretty well gotten over, when four years + afterwards they threw
in the last desperate specific Panacea the Mercury of Jurisprudential Pharmacy the Legislator's Dispensary, the
punishment of Death. And in this state does the matter rest at present.
To judge of the whole by upon by principles of reason & utility, and not upon by positive
rules of Common Law which it is of the essence & the peculiar attribute of Legislative
provisions to supersede, they have done at best nothing more than applied that guard [at
last] to the invasion of this particular species of property at last, than which they were from the
first as much justified in applying to it as to any other — Two short Latin words
were the cause of all.
being individually the
It could not from the very first have escaped men of Law any more than
the rest of mankind, that while some species of animals easily born to elide man's & yield themselves to his management there are various species of others which unless
whenever their faculty of locomotion were be are not circumscribed within very narrow & domestic.
These they demonstrated for the purpose
turn natural
bounds, From their savage intractable nature were are incapable of being insusceptible while alive by the subjects of appropriation. It was
very well perceived that no one could say numerically from seeing this one on the road or the
other on the wing, this is my Hare, or this is my Partridge, as he could, this
is my Sheep or this my Hen: and that tho' it the point of Law should be granted, that the being born
upon his Land, & fed nourished out of by his grain & Herbage should give him a good title, wheresoever
it could be made out the fact could be ascertained yet as that could never be done in the instance of any either
of these first marked animals, it was a truth as barren & as useless, as would be the Geometrical proportions those of the Mathematicians
concerning figure if there ever were any thing existing that was susceptible of figure.
THEFT. Deer.
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Identifier: | JB/070/247/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 70.
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070 |
of laws in general |
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247 |
larceny - deer |
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c4 |
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jeremy bentham |
[[watermarks::j honig & zoonen [lion with vryheyt motif]]] |
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23362 |
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