Note 104 — LETTER XIV

Equivocations of this sort have been so often noticed in the United States, that they must be looked on as notorious. The practice of naturalizing foreign seamen by the solemn farce of an old woman’s first cradling bearded men, and then swearing that she rocked them; and that of procuring pre-emption rights to land in new territories, by sowing only a few grains of corn, and subsequently swearing that a crop has been cultivated on the tract claimed, have been so frequent, that it would be invidious to particularize. In England, affidavits are often managed in a simpler way. Swallowing a custom-house oath is there a well known expression. Mercantile houses of London have kept persons, called swearing clerks, to vouch for transactions, on being paid at the rate of sixpence for each oath. If it is not true that men stand at Westminster Hall with straws in their shoes, indicating their willingness to undertake any dirty job, it is time that the foul imputation were washed from that pure fountain of justice. Before prosecutions for conspiracies had become so fashionable in England as they are now, a witness on behalf of the crown was convicted of ten separate perjuries. It would appear that a false oath is a morsel so hard, that it requires cooking before it can be masticated by the immoral in America, and that a less delicate class in England can gulp it down in the raw state. Without making any comment on regulations that protect revenue at the expense of morality; those laws that set the interests, and the very personal liberties of men at variance with their consciences, and without inquiring how far evasive subterfuges may palliate the conduct of the ignorant in their own eyes, or in the sight of the great being invoked; it is suggested, in explanation, that popular institutions have the innate property of impressing an external reverence for the law, on the worst of men.—Flint.