[clx. 376]

1822 July 22

Constitut. Code Rationale

Securites Counterforce

5 Moral responsibility

Public Opinion Tribunal

Evidednce

There are two ways /two correspondent and opposite modes/ of laying claim to the exercise of the blockading system /power/ on the ground of alledged or assumed superiority in intellectual aptitude: the one consists in magnifying the alledged aptitude of the governors; the other in parvifying the alledged inaptitude of the governed. Each of them is employed as occasion serves. The parvifying mode may be used in all situations as occasion serves: it gives no offence to the reader or hearer if he be of the ruling or otherwise influential class: in a word, unless, in his own conception he belongs to that inferior class at the expence of which the pretension is set up. The magnifying mode, being in fact the self-magnifying mode can not without giving offence be employed in any other situation other than those in which custom has thrown its veil over arrogance impudence and insolence: namely the situation of those by whom the power of surmounting contradiction by punishment is possessed and exercised.

It is curious to see with what undeviating constancy how in certain authoritative discourses the possession of the maximum of appropriate official aptitude in all its branches [...?] and in particular intellectual aptitude in the degree indicated by the romantic appellative wisdom is predicated of themselves - by the very scum of the population: by a set of men in comparison of whom the most vitious of those whom they consign to death or punishment which ends not but with life are virtuous - by a body composed of the principals and instruments of misrule depredation and oppression all upon the largest /an all-comprehensive/ scale: of corruptors and corrupted: of selfish and empty-headed /[...?] and [...?]/ loungers, present at the scene of action when brought /led/ thither by some general or particular sinister interest, absent at all other times led by a few venal utterers of vague generalities and common-place fallacies and other vague generalities: men whose minds being imbecillitated /debilitated/ by that worse than useless education which under a system of corrupt and corruptive establishments overgrown opulence affords /secures/ /bestows/, know not an unapt argument from an apt one, a relevant argument from an irrelevant one, possessing neither inclination nor ability nor inclination to discern the difference.