132-063.xml

Title: [[copyist’s hand] nd [wm 1818]]

Description: [copyist’s hand]

nd [wm 1818]

To Erskine

2

8

To return to the Whigs. Notwithstanding this unchangeable determination to keep what power they had, such, as early as the year 1780, was their aptitude for that which they had not, and so deep the game which it was the effect of that appetite to make them play for it that, in 1780, under the lead of Charles Fox, that prince of Gamesters, to which Brooks’s supplied one gaming-table and St Stephen’s another they had actually been brought to continue in their adherence to them, after he had signed a declaration in favour of annuality of elections, even of unlimited universality of suffrage.

If in the course of this contest, this edict of theirs shall be found to have received damage, I am truly sorry for it, but the fault is none of mine. Could his friends but have satisfied themselves with keeping up the image of the amiable man, as I have seen that of a Russian | | all gilt with gold, in a corner Cup-board, on a glass case, for family devotion – nothing of the sort would have happened. But when, like those of Bel and the Dragon, his name is made an instrument of delusion, and the people, whom, while he publickly bowed at, he privately scorned, are called upon, and so indefatigably, to fall down and worship the golden image which party ambition is set up, it will be the fault not of people but of | | if, by the fate of those excellent idols that of the reputation of this modern one shall be found to have been | | and typified.

As to the | | that, on their part, from that time and earlier down to the present, the show of desire of reform, never has been any more than a show – that it has been either their endeavour, or their desire, to help to bestow upon the subject many any the least particle of those means of security which it was in their power to withhold, among the propositions, which by this your Lordship’s defence of them I have been engaged to endeavour to prove: prove more to the conviction than I fear to the satisfaction of a Noble Lord, whose eloquence has lifted him up, as well as so many of his admirers, so much above the sphere of the old philosopher, whose chief study as well as difficulty was as he informs us, to know himself.

132-046.xml

Title: [1819 May 3 + To Erskine Lett]

Description: 1819 May 3 +

To Erskine

Lett. II. Whig Merits

§.3. J.B.s Remarks

13

V. Existence given to measures lessening the hardship of Military Service.

“Behold a miracle, instead of wit.”

By Windham’s giddy hand one good mark hit.

Scarcely could Burke himself be a more implacable enemy to every thing good in government, than was this his imitator in the manufacture of Parliament tinsel.

132-042.xml

Title: [1819 Mar. 22 + To Erskine II]

Description: 1819 Mar. 22 +

To Erskine

II. Whig Merits

§.3. J.B’s Remarks

11

5

9

III. Foundation laid for official Parliamentary reform.

That of this means of national salvation there has been at different times no small shew is to a certain degree matter of notoriety: though such are the shackles indirectly applied / imposed/ by those self-stiled protectors of liberty upon the liberty of the press not near so notorious as could be wished.

Whether, from first to last, there has in intention, howsoever it may have been in effect, ever been any thing more than show, it will be the endeavour of these letters to render manifest to every eye that can endure to keep itself open to the enquiry.

Against misrule, there never has been, there never can be, any tolerable security, any farther than in proportion as the choice of those by whom rule is exercised, is in the hands of those who, in proportion to the enormity of the misrule, are sufferers. But with the exception of the case, in which it falls, as above, upon their own heads and shoulders, in no shape can misrule exercise itself, but the Whigs are as such sharers in the profits of it: theirs being the expectancy of that which their more prosperous antagonists are in possession. In the mean time they are, and even in possession, sharers in the channel or through which that profit in proportion as it is acquired flows: namely the part they have in Saint Stephen’s. In proportion as they lost their seats, they would lose not only their prospect, as above, of a share in the more tangible profits of misrule, but moreover no small share of profit in possession: profit by the sweets of that domestic tyranny, which they are thereby enabled to exercise over their neighbours: and whether they do or do not exercise it, profit by the gratification, which the faculty of exercising it at any time is continually administering to their pride. It therefore is, and ever was, and ever will be, inconsistent with the nature of man, that, in a body or in any considerable proportion of that body they should be made /engaged/ to relinquish such shares, as they respectively have in the mass of aristocratic power by any other means, than those by the force of which the British Parliament were, in 1782, engaged to give up a part of the tyranny they had so long been exercising over the

Irish