I am however at the end of my labor, and have in reward for all my toil and vexation a judgment in my favor.  But hold—­a sagacious commander, in the adversary’s army, has found a flaw in the proceeding.  My triumph is turned into mourning.  I have used or, instead of and, or some mistake, small in appearance, but dreadful in its consequences; and have the whole of my success quashed in a writ of error.  I remove my suit; I shift from court to court; I fly from equity to law, and from law to equity; equal uncertainty attends me everywhere; and a mistake in which I had no share, decides at once upon my liberty and property, sending me from the court to a prison, and adjudging my family to beggary and famine.  I am innocent, gentlemen, of the darkness and uncertainty of your science.  I never darkened it with absurd and contradictory notions, nor confounded it with chicane and sophistry.  You have excluded me from any share in the conduct of my own cause; the science was too deep for me; I acknowledged it; but it was too deep even for yourselves:  you have made the way so intricate, that you are yourselves lost in it; you err, and you punish me for your errors.

The delay of the law is, your lordship will tell me, a trite topic, and which of its abuses have not been too severely felt not to be complained of?  A man’s property is to serve for the purposes of his support; and therefore, to delay a determination concerning that, is the worst injustice, because it cuts off the very end and purpose for which I applied to the judicature for relief.  Quite contrary in the case of a man’s life; there the determination can hardly be too much protracted.  Mistakes in this case are as often fallen into as many other; and if the judgment is sudden, the mistakes are the most irretrievable of all others.  Of this the gentlemen of the robe are themselves sensible, and they have brought it into a maxim. De morte hominis nulla est cunctatio longa. But what could have induced them to reverse the rules, and to contradict that reason which dictated them, I am utterly unable to guess.  A point concerning property, which ought, for the reasons I have just mentioned, to be most speedily decided, frequently exercises the wit of successions of lawyers, for many generations. Multa virum volvens durando saecula vincit. But the question concerning a man’s life, that great question in which no delay ought to be counted tedious, is commonly determined in twenty-four hours at the utmost.  It is not to be wondered at, that injustice and absurdity should be inseparable companions.