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put a hundred or for a hundred a thousand.
Built originally for feasting,
Westminster Hall is thus become the great
national school for perjury —
Picking out men, in whose
breasts the aversion to mendacity is Strongest
and most incontestable - picking out
these men, and expelling them from the
Witness's box, with ignominy stampt on
their characters - is another service extracted
by the Judge and Co. from this ceremony.
In the instance of one half
of that order of men, who are so richly paid
for professing to impress morality, in all
it's shapes, upon the conduct of the rest of
the community, the universality of habitual
perjury has been already Brought to view.
One of those suits, which
the existing system engenders in such
multitudes - a suit in which one of the
parties is conscious of being in the wrong,
has (suppose) place. One percipient witness
there is, whose testimony, were he
admitted as a narrating witness, is on good
grounds believed by this dishonest suitor to
be an Atheist. But Atheist, as he is, nothing
does it happen to him to have, or to be so much
as supposed to have, to bias him, and warp
his testimony one way or the other: and no
man is maleficent without a motive.
20.
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service the powers of machinery and steam.
He might perform them in the Chinese
style: and for every oath taken, have a
Sancer broken: and thus at no greater
expense than the sacrifice of religion,
morality and happiness, confer a benefit
on that branch of trade; For the loss by
assertory perjuries, amateurs might
indemnify themselves by increase given
to the stock of promissory ones.
If this be not agreeable,
let all hitherto published editions of the
Bible be called in, and appropriately amended
editions substituted. Out of "Thou
shall not take the name of the Lord thy
God in vain", let be omitted the word not.
For "Swear not all," after the word
Swear, let be inserted the words Swear
and cause swear, whatever you will,
whenever by, you or your's any thing is to
be got by it. Thus would be wiped clean
the irreligiousness of the practice: and
nothing would be left in it worse than
the immorality of it.
Not inconsiderable is the
service so recently rendered by the extending
to cases stiled criminal, the admission
so long ago given to Quakers and Morovians
evidence - Yet how inadequate and
thence how inconsistent the remedy, if it
stopt there?
29.
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Identifier: | JB/081/188/002 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 81.
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081 |
petition for justice |
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188 |
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002 |
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copy/fair copy sheet |
4 |
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recto |
c19 / c20 / c29 / c30 |
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25975 |
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