Swear Not at All

Originally published in 1813 and written to expose the mischief arising from the laws relating to the administration of oaths. In some cases, so he declared, the Promissory Oath prevented a man from doing what he knew to be right; in others, it afforded him a ready excuse for the commission of some wrong. George III laid on his Coronation Oath the responsibility of the American War and of his resistance to the claims of the Catholics. He had sworn to maintain his dominions entire; he had sworn to preserve the Church of England. At Oxford, barbers, cooks, bedmakers, errand boys, and other unlettered retainers to the University were habitually sworn in English to the observance of a medley of statutes penned in Latin - the oath thus solemnly taken but never kept. On matriculating, he had himself been excused from taking the oaths by reason of his tender years; and this relieved him from a state of very painful doubt, for even then he felt strong objections against needless swearing. Bentham did not, however, regard Assertory or Judicial Oaths as open to the same serious objections; but, while recognizing the necessity of some formal sanction, he did not approve of the ceremony being made a sacred invocation, for that was apt to obscure the real mischief of judicial falsehood - the mischief occasioned by the lie. If criminality be centered in the profanation of the ceremony, who is to say whether the sanction for truth be in operation or not? Who can say what are the religious opinions hidden in the breast of the witness? First went ordeal, he writes; then went duel; after that went, under the name of wager of law, the ceremony of an oath in its pure state; by-and-by this last of the train of supernatural powers, ultima clicolfm, will be gathered with AstrFa into its native skies.