[xxxvi. 13]

1821. April 26.

First Lines

Constitutional Finance?

To support the dignity of the Crown, to add splendour to the Crown, to add lustre to the Crown, so many phrases upon the strength of which money wrung from a starving people by scarcely supportible taxation, is day by day by the creatures and dependents of the Monarch called for without measure and without shame: called for and granted accordingly, with what effect? With the effect of labouring in vain to fill overfull the ever leaky cup of his personal gratification, of giving any encreasing force or perpetual encrease to the delusion by which the seat of necessary depravity, is converted into the seat of imaginary and fabled excellence, and in making every day fresh and fresh advances towards the accomplishment of the constant object of all endeavours the conversion of a scarce disguised, into the more simple and convenient form of an undisguised, and openly avowed, despotism.

It has been seen to what inevitable necessity by the original and unchangeable nature of man, an irremovable Chief Magistrate call him Duke call him Consul, call him King, call him Emperor, cal him what you will, is an enemy to all that are subject to his rule, with the exception of those who are sharers with him in the sinister profit - and that enemy an implacable one.

What at the same time is no less manifest is that by every step by which any advance can be made towards dissolving the disastrous association by which the instruments of vice and misery are palmed upon mankind as the necessary instruments of security and universal happiness, or real service and that a most important one vice will be rendered