[114-014v]

1821. April 14

Codification Offer

'7 Foreigner why

Thus stands the matter in respect of appropriate knowledge and active talent. In respect of appropriate judgment, the advantage will be seen to lie on the side of the foreigner as such. Error in judgment has for its causes prejudice and original mental weakness. Prejudice is erroneous prepossession. According to the nature of its cause, erroneous prejudice is interest begotten, authority begotten, or habit-begotten prejudice. The native will have his prejudices, the foregoer will have his. But the native draughtsman will find in the first place those to whom his draught goes for acceptance, and in the next place those over whom, if adopted, it will legislate, and whose portion of felicity or infelicity will, if it be adopted, be determined by it, imbued with and more less misled by, the same prejudices: whereas, whatsoever may happen to be the prejudices of the foreigner, they will not, on the part of those to whom it belongs to make what use it is their pleasure to make of his draught, be partakers with him in any of those prejudices of his, by which his case differs from theirs: in their minds, he will find arrayed against his own peculiar prejudices not only such adverse prejudices as belong to their situation, but those apposite reason, which, in so far as the nature of the case furnishes them, they will be set in search of, by the antipathy which, in their minds, in a greater or less degree his prejudices will, by collision with theirs be so apt to excite. In every situation this antipathy will in certainty and intensity and extent be greater than, on account of those who partake in it could be wished: and in the situation of those to whom his draught would have to present itself for acceptance, it would receive ulterior excitement, from the would given to individual as well as national pride and vanity, by the intrusion of a foreign hand, as well as from the more substantial sinister interests natural to that situation, as above.

It is not by their mere existence - it is only by their pernicious efficiency - that these causes of error operate towards their undesirable end: in the case of the native, that efficiency is a maximum: in the case of the foreigner, it is equal to 0.