Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/478

 A Forgotten Chapter in the Life of Jefferson. collected these laws from those of Ina, of Offa, /Ethelbert and his ancestors, saying nothing of any of them being taken from the scripture." The inconsistencies above quoted seem to remove all further question in the point. And now comes Jefferson's severe arraign ment of English jurists from the time of Matthew Hale down to his own time. " Yet, palpable as it must be to a lawyer, our judges have piously avoided lifting the veil under which it was shrouded. In truth the alliance between Church and State in Eng land has ever made their judges accomplices in the frauds of the clergy; and even bolder than they are; for instead of being contented with the surreptitious introduction of the four chapters of Exodus, they have taken the whole leap and declared at once that the whole Bible and Testament, in a lump, make a part of the common law of the land; the first judicial declaration of which was by this Sir Matthew Hale. And thus they incor porate into the English code laws made for the Jews alone, and the precepts of the gos pel, intended by their benevolent author as obligatory only in foro couscicntiac,?cí< they arm the whole with the coercions of munici pal law." Turning now to a letter written by Jeffer son to Maj. John Cartwright June 5, 1824,' four years after the publication of this thesis, we find that the more Jefferson reads and thinks on the subject in question the more indignant he becomes. After briefly covering the general ground of his argu ment, he proceeds to show that Finch founds his doctrine on the mistranslated words of Prisot, written a century and a half before; that Wingate, forty-five years later, erects this false translation into a maxim of the common law, copying Finch but citing Prisot; that Sheppard copies the same, quot ing Finch and Wingate; that Hale long afterward uses the authority but makes no 1 Writings of Jefferson, Vol. VII. p. 355.

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citation; and so on down, through Wood, Blackstone, and Mansfield, the later author ities falling into the original error. Viewing this error in the light of a crime, Jefferson closes a long paragraph with this harsh conclusion : " What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!" It will thus be seen that while the sage of Monticello at eighty-one had lost none of that power of analysis which made him great, his patience, once believed by himself to be well nigh infinite, had discovered its limitatations. When, soon after, Major Cartwright caused Jefferson's frank and infor mal letter to be published without authority from him, the full limit of his patience was reached. In a letter to Edward Everett, dated Monticello, October 15, 1824,2 Jefferson writes : " The publication of the letter in such a case, without the consent of the writer, is not a fair practice." But the author stands by his guns. He says the judges and divines "may cavil but cannot refute it." And then he reviews his argu ment, concluding with, " A license which should permit 'ancient scripture' to be translated 'holy scripture" annihilates at once all the evidence of language. With such a license we might reverse the sixth commandment into 'thou shall not omit murder.' It will be the more extraordinary in this case, where the mistranslation was to effect the adoption of the whole code of the Jewish and Christian laws into the text of our statutes, to convert religious offenses into temporal crimes, to make the breach of every religious precept a subject of indict ment, submit the question of idolatry, for example, to the trial of a jury, and to a court, its punishment, to the third and fourth generation of the offenders." The long letter closes with this character istic bit 2 Writings of autobiography of Jefferson, Vol.not VII. included p. 380. in