which he should thus have been so useful.
As it was, he had made but little progress in

this desirable pursuit; nevertheless, what he had done was a beginning, and it actually had raised an alarm among forestallers, engraters, and other enemies to the lower part of the community.
He had also a plan of inducing a parliamentary attention to the liberal arts, and he meant, as a preliminary step, to try at a regulation of public amusements.
Many other benevolent ideas occupied his thoughts, tending both to public accommodation and private convenience; but the scheme that most delighted him was one by means of which he had flattered himself he should be able to curtail the privileges of lawyers, whose emoluments drained from the necessitous, he proved by computation, amounted to a third more upon any twenty given causes, than the damages given in those causes by the jury; and were the aggregate account of expences and damages come at for seven, or seventeen, nay or seventy years, he had reason to think the proportion would be just the same.
This clearly proved that a man, with ever so just a cause, had better put up with a first loss, let it be what it might, than seek the only redress the laws

of his country had permitted him to have recourse to. Yet no step had been taken to cure this evil.
His catalogue of such abuses as came under the cognizance of the courts was immense. Those abuses of which the courts had not the smallest idea were a still larger list, and proved that the sole mode the legislature had provided to decide those two grand articles by which all the ties of good-fellowship are cemented, by which ranks are distinguished, property ascertained and secured—In short, right and wrong;—instead of holding out security, and being a blessing, was a curse, in a land of freedom, that the most oppressive tyranny had never equalled in any country.
This last enumeration of abuses, he said, was the most grievous thing that could be conceived to people of middling life. These abuses consisted of processes that went no farther than arrests and accommodations, in which the attornies, though adverse professionally, were privately intimate friends.—These erected themselves into judge and jury, and the result was nine times out of ten that the defendant, to avoid imprisonment, was forced into terms impossible to be complied with.
Could any provision take in all it was meant to

comprehend which failed of effect in any particular? The laws of England did in a very essential particular: they precluded the poor from any benefit from them,