'Pshaw! These are the distempered dreams of reform run mad.'
'Are they? Consider! Beware of the mischief of deciding rashly! Beware of your passions, that are alarmed lest they should be disappointed.'
'It is you that decide. Prove this rooted evil of law.'
'Suppose me unable to prove it: are its consequences the less real?
But I will endeavour.
'He, who is told that, "to do justice is to conduce with all his power to the well being of the whole," has a simple intelligible rule for his conduct.
'He, on the contrary, who is told that, "to do justice is to obey the law," has to inquire, not what is justice! but, what is the law? Now to know the law, (were it practicable!) would be not only to know the statutes at large by rote, but all the precedents, and all the legal discussions and litigations, to which the practitioners of law appeal! Innumerable volumes, filled with innumerable subtleties and incoherencies, and written in a barbarous and unintelligible jargon, must be studied! Memory is utterly inadequate to the task; and reason revolts, spurns at and turns from it with loathing.
'A short statement of facts will, in my opinion, demonstrate that law, in its origin and essence, is absolutely unjust.
'To make a law is to make a rule, by which a certain class of future events shall be judged.
'Future events can only be partially and imperfectly foreseen.
'Consequently, the law must be partial and imperfect.