第195章

The same arguments that prove the injustice of tests maybe applied universally to all oaths of duty and office. If I entered upon the office without an oath, what would be my duty? Can the oath that is imposed upon me make any alteration in my duty? If not, does not the very act of imposing it by implication assert a falsehood? Will this falsehood have no injurious effect upon a majority of the persons concerned? What is the true criterion that I shall faithfully discharge the office that conferred upon me? Surely my past life, not any protestations I may be compelled to make. If my life have been unimpeachable, this compulsion is an unmerited insult; if it have been otherwise, it is something worse.

It is with no common disapprobation that a man of undebauched understanding will reflect upon the prostitution of oaths, which marks the history of modern European countries, and particularly of our own. This is one of the means that government employs to discharge itself of its proper functions, by making each man security for himself. It is one of the means that legislators have provided to cover the inefficiency and absurdity of their regulations, by making individuals promise the execution of that which the police is not able to execute. It holds out, in one hand, the temptation to do wrong, and, in the other, the obligation imposed not to be influenced by that temptation. It compels a man to engage, not only for his own conduct, but for that of all his dependents. It obliges certain officers (church-wardens in particular) to promise an inspection beyond the limits of human faculties, and to engage for a proceeding, on the part of those under their jurisdiction, which they neither intend, nor are empowered to enforce. Will it be believed in after ages that every considerable trader in exciseable articles in this country is induced, by the constitution of its government, to reconcile his mind to the guilt of perjury, as to the condition upon which he is allowed to exercise his profession?

There remains only one species of oaths to be considered, which have found their advocates among persons sufficiently speculative to reject every other species of oath, I mean, oaths administered to a witness in a court of justice. 'These are certainly free from many of the objections that apply to oaths of fidelity, duty or office. They do not call upon a man to declare his assent to a certain proposition which the legislator has prepared for his acceptance; they only require him solemnly to pledge himself to the truth of assertions, dictated by his own apprehension of things, and expressed in his own words. They do not require him to engage for something future, and, of consequence, to shut up his mind against further information, as to what his conduct in that future ought to be;Chapter ut merely to pledge his veracity to the apprehended order of things past.'

These considerations palliate the evil, but do not convert it into good.

Wherever, in any quarter of the globe, men of peculiar energy and dignity of mind have existed, they have felt the degradation of binding their assertions with an oath. The English constitution recognizes, in a partial and imperfect manner, the force of this principle, and therefore provides, that, while the common herd of mankind shall be obliged to confirm their declarations with an oath, nothing more shall be required from the order of nobles, in the very function which, in all other cases, has emphatically received the appellation of juror, than a declaration upon honour. Will reason justify this distinction?