[xxxvi. 8]

1821. Aril 26.

First Lines

Constitutional Finance?

3. Where, at the first commencement of the habit of witnessing, with or without the habit of producing, sufferance, sympathetic suffering has ben produced by the sight of it, the continuance of the habit will, sooner or later, extinguish the sympathy. It is thus extinguished, for example as abovementioned, in the surgeon, or he would not be fit for the exercise of his beneficent art. It is thus nearly if not altogether extinguished, supposing it originally to have had place, in the breast of the military conqueror, or he would not be fit for the exercise of his maleficent art. The mother, who has lately lost a son in battle, has some conception of what the miseries of war are, and feels and grieves accordingly for those who are partakers of them. Under a monarchy, absolute or limited, among the functionaries in the higher ranks, commencing with the monarch, so confirmed is the habit of hearing of men by thousands, and tens of thousands slaughtered or reduced from happiness to misery by the operations, by the orders given by these their rulers for the purpose of giving further and further extension to their own power, factitious dignity, and opulence no greater portion of sympathetic suffering is prduced in such breasts by the tidings of any such catastrophe than has place in the breast of a gardener while he is setting his foot on a swarm of caterpillars. The same monarch in whose breast the sight of a favourite, suffering from a hurt experienced in the course of a floric /frolic/, had in early youth produced an almost equal pain of sympathy will, as ambition encreases and sympathetic sensibility decreases, receive with indifference the news of a limb lost by that same favourite in company with thousands of limbs and as many lives lost by others in the course of a battle from which the power of the wholesale manufacturer of human misery is thought as receiving /regarded as receiving/ encrease.

As it is with the universal superor, so it is with the subordinates: quantities and degrees being proportioned to the place occupied by them respectively in the gorgeous scale.