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!
CHAPTER XLI. P. I.
REVENUE OF THE CORPORATION OF DONCASTER WELL APPLIED.
Play not for gain but sport: who plays for more
Than he can lose with pleasure, stakes his heart;
Perhaps his wife's too, and whom she hath bore.
HERBERT.
Well, gentle Reader, we have made our way through the Charters, and seen that the Borough of Doncaster is, as it may be called, an imperium in imperio—or regnum, or rather if there were such word regnulum, in regno, (such a word there ought to be, and very probably was, and most certainly would be if the Latin were a living language)—a little kingdom in itself, modelled not unhappily after the form of that greater one whereof it is a part; differing from it, for reasons so evident that it would be a mere waste of words and time to explain them,—in being an elective instead of an hereditary monarchy, and also because the monarchy is held only for a year, not for life; and differing in this respect likewise that its three estates are analogous to the vulgar and mistaken notion of the English constitution, not to what that constitution is, as transmitted to us by our fathers.
We have seen that its Mayor (or Monarch,) its twelve Aldermen (or House of Lords,) all being of the better and more excellent inhabitants, and its four and twenty capital Burgesses (or House of Commons,) all of the better, more reputable and discreet Doncastrians, constitute one body corporate and politic in reality, deed and name, to the fear and terror of the wicked, and for the support and reward of the good; and that the municipal government has been thus constituted expressly to the end that Doncaster might remain for ever a borough of harmony and peace: to the better effecting of which most excellent intent, a circumstance which has already been adverted to, contributes greatly, to wit, that Doncaster sends no members to Parliament.
Great are the mysteries of Corporations; and great the good of them when they are so constituted, and act upon such principles as that of Doncaster.