[mainly in copyist’s hand]

1819 Nov 9.

Benthams

§.1. Seats & Districts

{1. Seats & Districts}

Over number Remedies

3

6

Under any efficient obligation of attendance, to many a man, whose services might be of prime use, the nausea, produced by stale arguments, served up in a bas manner, would suffice to render the function intolerable, affords a most powerful cause for non-attendance, and even in some degree an excuse for it.

But where, as in a British House of Commons, with the exception of those men of all work who are hired for it, any such obligation as that of attendance is no more felt than at an opera, every man feels the remedy and that a compleat one, in his hands.

As to the desks, an implement necessary to the remedy employed in the Congress House, in England the size and form of the House, convenient as it is in other respects, would of itself suffice perhaps to put an exclusion upon it. But a French Assembly might in this particular see in the English House of Commons what to avoid, in the Congress House of Representatives what to imitate.

The Book of Fallacies – a work commenced about nine years ago and still in an unfinished state, is, in an illustrious hand, in a course of preparation for the press. A Table, exhibiting an arrangement, and a list of these poisoned weapons, accompanies the present work. The proposed names alone being here given and not the things denominated – those names unavoidably grotesque, and given without explanation – some readers may, in the mean time, find amusement in them in the character of riddles: and another pastime might be – the calculating what proportion, of the aggregate mass of parliamentary oratory, might fly off in vapour, if subjected to the test afforded by these denominations.