[xxxvi. 137]

1822 July 15

Constitut. Code Rationale

Supreme Operative

I. Monarch

?. Cause of Monarchical Misrule, sinister interest not upright prejudice.

The amount of misrule and its effects being given, a standing question a question that on each occasion presents itself is - as to how much of it is it owing to moral inaptitude, how much to intellectual: how much to sinister interest, how much to prejudice, whether interest-begotten or derived from other causes: not to speak of intellectual weakness. The question however is a matter rather of curiosity than of use: of use to the purpose of affording direction /guidance/ to practice. Take this or that mischievous /anti popular/ arrangement at pleasure: if not its creation, its preservation is at any rate is the work of the sinister interest. Independently of the sinister interest, let /be/ the institution let the arrangement let/ be/ the phantasm of the imagination be ever so absurd, go back far enough, you may always find honest absurdity honest intellectual weakness sufficient for the engendering /creation/ of it. How can it be otherwise? for /since/ among the people at large notions fraught with absurdity are not without example notions which being adverse to the interest of all /those/ by whom they are entertained can not have had for their cause sinister interest at any rate can not have had correct conceptions of particular interest. But so long as it is by the sinister interest that the causes of evil are supported and maintained whether it was in sinister interest or in /the moral part or in/ the intellectual part of the mental frame that the evil had originally its rise matters nothing to any practical purpose Many are the instances in which that which at first sight will present itself as the result of intellectual weakness, will on scrutiny be found /seen/ to have been the genuine fruit of sinister interest: and the more closely the mechanism of misrule is scrutinized into, the more extensively will this genealogy be seen to have had place.

Give examples