1821. April 28.

First Lines

Penal

Constitutional

Distributive.

In so far as it matches with, and is determined by, the state of the Constitutional branch of law, the state of the remunerative /penal/ branch of law will, under the different forms of Government, wear /present/ the different complexions /aspects/ following.

The state of the penal branch of law exercises an influence on the state and the results of the constitutioal branch of Law in manner following.

Conscious more or less of the opposition that has place between their own particular interests and the greatest happiness of the greatest number - alie, at the same time, to the /a/ sense of the dangers that attach upon the situation from which they derive that sinister interest, - haunted not merely by a correct and adequate but by an exaggerated picture /image/ of those dangers, - under Monarchy whether absolute or limited, under aristocacy, under every form of Government but Representative democracy, never in the imagination of the ruling one, of the sub-ruling or the influential few can the mass /height or breadth/ of securities in which they intrench themselves be sufficient: in that part of the entrenchment which is the work of the penal law, death, substituted to punishment in any less odious and more appropriate form - torture antecedent and concomitant added to simple death /destruction of life/ - punishment of the acknowledged innocent added to that of the reputed guilty - confiscation and interception under pretence of corruption of blood, interception of inheritance for that and other purposes - pains of hell in prospect under the sad necessity of not being able to apply /give/ them in present reality possession and existence, - all these penal securities put together are insufficient to produce that inward tranquillity which conscience keeps for ever banished from those misery-bound and misery-producing situations. Hence it is that every act which in those distempered imaginations, threatens to substitute to the superlatively mischievous form of government in which they behold the source of their sinister profit /benefits/ a form in any degree less mischievous is, by that same distempered imagination, elevated to a rank towering above the highest /most mischievous/ of those offences, by which real mischief is produced.