1821. April 28.

First Lines

Every particle of power, over and above that quantity which is necessary to the giving existence and security to the best form of Government, is an instrument of misrule: every particle of factitious dignity without exception is not only an instrument of individual injury to those who have none of it, but an instrument of misrule. Every particle of the matter of opulence, added to a mass of a certain magnitude already in hands, adds to the facility, and thence to the desire, of administering, by all sorts of means imaginable, innoxious or noxious further and further gratification to that insatiable concupiscence.

Hence it is that while it is conducive to the greatest happiness of the greatest number that, for the sake of present enjoyment, the matter of subsistence and opulence into lots of such smallness as is consistent with the sense of individual security for property as well with the magnitude and sufficiency of that aggregate stock of the matter of opulence which is necessary to national security in all its shapes as against all its adversaries, so is itin a distinct and particular manner to the particular object of the constitutional branch of law: viz. security against misrule:- against injury to the subject many at the hands of the ruling few as such.

From /On/ /In the breasts of/ the part of that class /description/ of men in whose instance preeminent opulence has for its accompaniment pride grounded on the contemplation of ancestry, the so generally prevalent and but too efficient propensty to place in comparative indigence all their children but one for the purpose of heaping opulence upon that one as will as to commoitt depredation upon as many as they feel within the reach of it on the false pretence of a fund for payment which with the assistance of their accomplices in the several shapes of the legislator and professional lawyer they have secretly contrived to render inapplicable to the purpose has been already brought to view: in the same breast may be seen the seed-plot of the abovementioned ever insatiable concupiscence.