25 Jan y 1810

Parl y Reform

Ch.12.

'.4. Mischief to Bribe giver's mind

11

2

The complaint, if I mistake /misrecollect/ not, was Sir Robert Walpole's, that he was forced /found himself obliged/ to bribe men meaning Members of Parliament /Parliament men/, to make them do even their duty. In /Out of/ this complaint he made an apology, or rather a justification. The complaint served for an apology or rather a justification. For how is government to go forward or society to be kept together if government duty is not done? But whether it did or did not amount to a full justification, at any rate if any person there be to whom it appears that in the eyes /sight/ of the Minister himself it bore that character, to that person it can hardly appear that by the giving way to so imperious a necessity any very deep "taint or contamination" could have been imprinted on so Right Honorable a mind.

But of whether either in the character of an apology or in the character of a justification the observation had any justice in it in the mouth of Sir Robert Walpole, it is difficult not to suppose but that the practice must not unfrequently present itself in the same justifiable or at least venial light to any other person whose lot should have placed him under the yoke of the like unpleasant necessity. And so often in whatever number of instances it shall have happened that this view of the matter, correct or incorrect, shall have presented itself, really and bonâ fide presented itself, to the /our/ bribe-giver's mind, in the same number of instances must it have happened that whatsoever spot may have imprinted itself in the intellectual part of his mind must there have stopped, without reaching the moral part of it.