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!