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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow CHAPTER XXII.: SEVENTEENTH DEVICE—SHAM PECUNIARY CHECKS TO DELAY, VEXATION, AND EXPENSE. - The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 7 (Rationale of Judicial Evidence Part 2)

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CHAPTER XXII.: SEVENTEENTH DEVICE—SHAM PECUNIARY CHECKS TO DELAY, VEXATION, AND EXPENSE. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 7 (Rationale of Judicial Evidence Part 2) [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 7.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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CHAPTER XXII.

SEVENTEENTH DEVICE—SHAM PECUNIARY CHECKS TO DELAY, VEXATION, AND EXPENSE.

Under this head may be placed every case in which, to an obnoxious practice attended with a profit (especially if with a pecuniary profit) to which no assignable limit applies, a fixed or limited loss has, in the character of a restraint and of a remedy, been opposed.

Exemplifications are,—

1. Fixed or limited sums given under the name of costs, to be paid on the score of some step, some special incidental step, productive (as almost every step is productive) of its particular delay.

2. Costs given, though unlimited, under the notion of a reimbursement made to the party injured by this or that step, at the charge of the party who has made it, or imposed on his adversary the obligation of making it,—costs, though in this sense unlimited, given in a case where the profit by the delay may be greater than these costs.

3. Deposits: money, in a fixed or limited sum, exacted or pretended to be about to be exacted antecedently to the taking of this or that step: to be returned or not returned, according to the propriety or impropriety of the step, as evidenced by subsequent lights. When not returned, such deposit has in general been given to the adverse party, in the name of costs: in some instances it has been allotted to some public fund; such as the revenue at large, the poor,* and so forth.

A penalty to which, in any instance, it can happen to find itself inferior to the profit of the transgression, operates, in that instance, not as a penalty, but as a licence.

In most, if not in all the instances in which this remedy in any of the above shapes has been applied, its incapacity of effecting its professed object, the cure of the disease, is so perfect and so obvious, that to suppose it capable of escaping the notice of the authors, would, under the notion of a compliment to their probity, be an injury to their more highly prized virtue, intelligence.

Does it require science to teach a man (especially to teach him in vain) that a quantity which is sometimes greater than another, will not always be equal to it?

It would therefore be an injury to this policy, to refuse it a place in our catalogue of devices.

In this character it is of admirable use: like most other articles in the catalogue, a polychrest.

1. Use to reputation: display made of the love of justice: vigilance to discover the disease, wisdom to devise the remedy, probity and activity to apply it.

2. Use to reputation again, if judiciously managed: display made of the virtue of humanity, if the sum be fixed at or limited to a low rate: the lower, and thence the more ineffectual, the greater the portion of praise from this source.

3. Security of the profit to the partnership, in the several cases in which the loss to the dishonest party is inferior to his profit from the offence.

Venerable personages! Their zeal is indefatigable—their sapience unfathomable: but so perverse and so constantly increasing is the wickedness of mankind, their utmost exertions leave them still behind it.

[* ]Lawrie.