1810 July 20 1810 11

Fallacies Ch | | Authority[?]

11

. 2. Lawyers interest Sinister

In a word it is the interest of this man of law that as well in respect of the intellectual as the moral part of mans frame /this ground[?]/, the person /its/ /the minds of/ subject to his power should be in a state of the most consummate depravation: /that they be at the same time, subject after[?] to a small necessary reserve /reservation. as wicked and as weak and as bland as possible:/ that /wicked/, consistently with their abstaining from such violence by which the persons and property of himself and his particular connections might /would/ be injured or endangered, (1) they may be in the habit of committing or in the case of being supposed or pretended to have committed, with the utmost frequency possible these transgressions in which his profit, power and reputation find their source: [...?] and blind that whatever enormities they see and feel him committ may be reverenced by them as manifestations of virtue (3): blind, that whatever inhuries theu suffer at his hands may be placed not to his account but to the account of the supposed unchangeable nature of things, or to the account of the wrongdoer where he makes as if he would /prepares to be ready to/ punish, but who in fact would never do or attempt to do the wrong he does, if the rod with which he is threatened to be punished, were not an instrument the use of which has been brought by him, an instrument of oppression prepared for him /kept in readiness/ and put into his hands.