ort be
borne: because an act of violence infers no principle; it infers nothing
but a momentary impulse of a bad mind, proceeding, without law or
justice, to the execution of its object. For at the same time that it
pays no regard to law, it does not debauch it, it does not wrest it to
its purposes: the law disregarded still exists; and hope still exists in
the sufferer, that, when law shall be resorted to, violence will cease,
and wrongs will be redressed. But whenever the law itself is debauched,
and enters into a corrupt coalition with violence, robbery, and wrong,
then all hope is gone; and then it is not only private persons that
suffer, but the law itself, when so corrupted, is often perverted into
the worst instrument of fraud and violence; it then becomes most odious
to mankind, and an infinite aggravation of every injury they suffer.

We have therefore in our charge strongly reprobated Sir Elijah Impey's
going to take such affidavits. "Oh! but," they say, "a judge may take an
affidavit in his chamber privately; and he may take an affidavit, though
not exactly in the place of his jurisdiction, to authenticate a bond, or
the like."--We are not to be cheated by words. It is not dirty shreds of
worn-out parchments, the sweepings of Westminster Hall, that shall serve
us in place of that justice upon, which the world stands. Affidavits! We
know that in the language of our courts affidavits do not signify a body
of evidence to sustain a criminal charge, but are generally relative to
matter [matters?] in process collateral to the charge, which, not coming
before the jury, are made known to the judge by way of affidavit.

But was it ever heard, or will it be borne, that a person exercising a
judicial office under his Majesty should walk beyond the sphere of his
jurisdiction,--that he should desert the station in which he was placed
for the protection of the natives, and should march to such a place as
Lucknow in order to take depositions for criminating persons in that
country, without so much as letting these poor victims know one article
in the depositions so taken? These depositions, my Lords, were made to
criminate, they were meant to justify a forfeiture, and are not in the
nature of those voluntary affidavits which, whether made within
jurisdiction or without, whether made publicly or privately, signify
comparatively nothing to the cause. I do not mean, to say that any
process of any court has not its weight, when