1819 Mar. 22 +

To Erskine

II. Whig Merits

§.3. J.B’s Remarks

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III. Foundation laid for official Parliamentary reform.

That of this means of national salvation there has been at different times no small shew is to a certain degree matter of notoriety: though such are the shackles indirectly applied / imposed/ by those self-stiled protectors of liberty upon the liberty of the press not near so notorious as could be wished.

Whether, from first to last, there has in intention, howsoever it may have been in effect, ever been any thing more than show, it will be the endeavour of these letters to render manifest to every eye that can endure to keep itself open to the enquiry.

Against misrule, there never has been, there never can be, any tolerable security, any farther than in proportion as the choice of those by whom rule is exercised, is in the hands of those who, in proportion to the enormity of the misrule, are sufferers. But with the exception of the case, in which it falls, as above, upon their own heads and shoulders, in no shape can misrule exercise itself, but the Whigs are as such sharers in the profits of it: theirs being the expectancy of that which their more prosperous antagonists are in possession. In the mean time they are, and even in possession, sharers in the channel or through which that profit in proportion as it is acquired flows: namely the part they have in Saint Stephen’s. In proportion as they lost their seats, they would lose not only their prospect, as above, of a share in the more tangible profits of misrule, but moreover no small share of profit in possession: profit by the sweets of that domestic tyranny, which they are thereby enabled to exercise over their neighbours: and whether they do or do not exercise it, profit by the gratification, which the faculty of exercising it at any time is continually administering to their pride. It therefore is, and ever was, and ever will be, inconsistent with the nature of man, that, in a body or in any considerable proportion of that body they should be made /engaged/ to relinquish such shares, as they respectively have in the mass of aristocratic power by any other means, than those by the force of which the British Parliament were, in 1782, engaged to give up a part of the tyranny they had so long been exercising over the

Irish