Compare this with what Blackstone says when speaking of the operations of just law being necessarily slow; that arises, says he, from “liberty, property, civility, commerce, and an extent of populous territory, which whenever we are willing to exchange for tyranny, poverty, barbarism, idleness, and a barren desert, we may then enjoy the same despatch of causes as is so highly extolled in some foreign countries.” Footnote 65: The pretence of the Contagious Diseases Acts may be reckoned as the lowest possible pretence, for it is that of attempting to preserve a man from the bodily inconveniences attending vicious habits, which by his own will he could avoid. Footnote 66: Speech delivered by Lord Chatham on the 20th November 1777. Footnote 67: If they had adopted the former definition without reserving this power of arbitrary omission, this law would have told too heavily upon the great; but even supposing that virtue might have continued to wink even under this law, still oblivious to them, and might have continued, as doubtless it would, to regard that as pardonable frailty in high life which is called prostitution among the humbler classes, yet there are others who, under this law, might have been too conveniently assailed; for policemen, examining surgeons, nay even sometimes justices of the peace, may not be unacquainted with temporary connections with that mistress, their appreciation of whose faithfulness makes them dread for her the severity of such a definition. Footnote 68: This appearance before the justice is only in case of disobedience to the Acts. In the first and all-important process of determining whether the woman be moral or vicious, not 10 per cent. of the women ever see the face of their judge, who condemns them on the hearsay evidence of the spy alone! Footnote 69: