The doctors / by Samuel Roberts.

  • Samuel Roberts
Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The doctors / by Samuel Roberts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    perceive that they are to he bled to death to supply the exhausted frames of the higher ranks with life-preserving blood, and I appre- hend that the inevitable consequences will not be long in following.* Will the people of this country submit to have despotic power placed in the hands of needy assistant Poor-Law Commissioners by which thousands of afflicted, unoffending poor, may be brought, by starvation, to a premature grave? Will they suffer their own feelings to be continually outraged by the bodies of such poor famished crea- tures being given up, by wholesale, for dissection to such honourable men as have been combined to be revenged on me for opposing their cruel oppression ? I think not. At any rate, were all the medical men in the country opposed to me, I would denounce all such measures as ruinous to the state, as well as disgusting to the people. I know that it hath been generally said—that / ought to have claimed of the Riding for damages. My then Solicitor told me so ; the Solicitors of the riot-creating doctors likewise told me so, and told me so, 1 believe, out of pure regard ; but I told them that—whatever might be laic—they were not the keepers of my conscience, nor would they have to answer for me at a future tribunal. In the first place, however, I was not the person (if any one ought) who ought to have applied. The occupant, the law says, is the proper person. The owner may be in a distant country—if at hand, he may apply- I 'as sure that in justice and equity, the Hiding was not the party which ought to sustain the damages. I knew if they did pay them it must be from either negligence, ignorance, partiality, or fear of the conse- quences of investigaton. It would then have been wrong—knowing what I did—either to tempt them to give—or myself to accept of it. I have always conceived public property to be as sacred as that of individuals—and I should not like to receive a few hundred pounds from a man as a debt, who really owed me nothing- I am sorry that such scrupulosity, as to the public property, is not a little more general. There are a few rather striking instances of this truth connected with this case, to which I mean to allude. I (as were likewise the combined Medical men) was bound to pro- secute a man, who had by an individual been accused of having been actively aiding in the riot. In my letter, to Mr. Smith, to the Ma- gistrates, I stated my reasons for refusing to prosecute. The more I have since reflected on the subject, the more I am convinced that I was right in that refusal. The accused person was of good character; he was only accused by one individual, and he (if I have not been mis-informed) would gladly have withheld his evidence ; and, after all, it appears that he had been mistaken, since, after a full hearing, the jury declared the accused innocent of the crime imputed to him. Now, though this innocent person escaped condemnation, he did not escape punishment. * I see by the public prints that a select Committee of the House of Lords has just been formed to devise methods of raising the price of corn, and consequently of bread to the poor, and that at a time when they have just been robbing the paupers of a part of their legal scanty pittance. God, they think, has been too bountiful. Will IIE not be avenged on such a people?
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