[xxxvi. 25]

1821. April 25

First Lines

Constitutional Finance

In a limited Monarchy, the Financial Department has for its actual end the opposite of frugality, waste - the maximum of waste.

In this species /Under this form/ of Government, this waste has three objects:

1. Personal gratification to the several appetites of the ruling one and the sub-ruling influential and opulent few. This object, in so far as regards the appetites of the ruling one, it has in common with absolute monarchy.

2. Corruption: exercise of corruptive influence for the purpose of securing corrupt obsequiousness on the part of those whose declared duty, and professed endeavour it is, to keep applied to the respective powers of the Monarch and the sub-ruling portion of the Aristocracy those limitations which they respectively acknowledge: corrupt obsequiousness to the effect of causing them to forbear the keeping actually applied those several limitations, thus rendering the Government in form and pretence limited; in effect to the benefit of the ruling one, and the sub-ruling the influential, and the opulent few, and to the sacrifice of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, absolute.

3. Delusion. In /To/ so far as the waste applies /employs/ itself, by means of corruptive influence, to the production of corrupt obsequiousness, on the part of those self-acknowledged and self-professed trustees for the whole community, it employs itself in rendering them, and, in so far as it produces its intended effect, it actually does render them, by so much inferior, in respect of public virtue and good behaviour - in respect of benevolence, and that beneficence which is the fruit of benevolence upon the most extended /largest/ scale, inferior to the rest of the community taken at large - inferior to the subject many - inferior to the vast majority of the whole population of the country. In the same proportion as those in whom /on whose part/ corrupt obsequiousness is produced, are rendered inferior in these respects, those by whose corruptive influence this corrupt obsequiousness is produced, are rendered, in at least an equal degre, inferior,

In

in a word, with reference to their several functions, appropriate moral aptitude.