1822 Sept. 25

Tripoli Securities against Misrule

Preliminary Explanations

?.10. Analytical view

?.10 Heads under which the Securities may be ranged

The way may now perhaps be found sufficiently prepared for a list of the several shapes in which the evil - oppression is liable to operate. The provision of detail by which the remedy is endeavoured to be applied will follow under these several heads when the nature and use of the remedy have been explained. Meantime, by a short distinction however the nature of them will in some instances be rendered the more distinctly visible. Oppression may accordingly be distinguished into primary and persevering into that which is in its original state, and that which is in a more matured and rooted state: in the one case it may be stiled simple oppression; in the other case ultra-oppression

Modes of Oppression against which security is here endeavoured to be provided are as follows -

1. Vexation on the account of religion: or say Religious persecution. NB. In this particular case, what may happen is - that the Sovereign, if from oppression on this account he does not himself derive any particular gratification, may be content to deprive his successors of it: while, by his own act he stands deprived of the power only because he has no desire to make use of it, they will by the same act stand deprived of it even though they should have the desire to make use of it. In this case therefore a direct promise of non-exercise, or even a direct appropriate abdication may, not without hope under favorable circumstances be sued for at his hands.

2. Secret Confinement, viz of the person of an individual: confinement, namely within the walls of a prison, or within any other less narrow space.

3. Secret Banishment: i.e. by forcible exportation or in any other way exclusion of an individual from the whole of the dominion of the state in question, or from this or that part of it.

4. Secret Homicide.(a)

5. Mysterious disappearance: namely disappearance of an individual from a cause as yet unknown: it may be any of the above three - confinement, banishment, or death.

Note(a)

(a)Against vexation in all these three shapes provision is of course already made in the existing system of law whatever it may be, and, the vexatious act being made punishable, secresy is of course an accompaniment endeavoured to be given to it. But when hands by which the injury is inflicted are of the number of those which are armed with power, that power extends to the giving to the whole operation a degree of secresy beyond any which could be given to it by ordinary and powerless hands and for the maintenance of secresy, even where power is irresistible the avoidance of odium affords commonly an adequate inducement. By the arrangements proposed under these heads secresy will be found combated by instruments of elucidation of which none are every where in use and of which some are not any where as yet in use.