1819 May 13

Disfranchising

§.5 Evil 4. Multiplying Country Members

3

2

2. In respect of appropriate intellectual aptitude.

It is something much beyond what can reasonably be expected, when in any considerable degree any quality that comes under this head is found in possession of your Country Gentleman.

His talk indeed is not indeed in the case of the greater number of them “of bullocks”: but it would be so much the better if it were. If it were of bullocks it would be not for any race that they run, but for the money which they can fetch: he would have the difference between pounds and shillings if not the /any such despicable/ difference as that between shillings and pence: he would have this, and thus far he would have progressed in the science and department of finance

No not only his talk but his thoughts and his heart will be /is/ sin[?] to me else – where dogs and horses are: in kennels /the kennel/ and in stables. By a singular /sort of paradoxical/ and unhappy contrast. By an unhappy and paradoxical coincidence – dogs and horses, animals more virtuous than ourselves – even if the truth may be spoken, than the two-legged species of us the swinish multitude, innocent in /of all/ intention[?] as they are – sincere as Whigs are insincere (and what can I say more?) – have a sad tendency to corrupt the understanding /minds/ of the /all such/ two-legged animals who live with them who run upon them and after them, and whom while themselves are tame, they continue in the savage state in the state of savagehood. Being themselves slaves they give continual exercise to the corresponding tyranny: producing habitually renewed fatigue they afford a demand and a pretext and a demand for habitually renewed indolence: and for those occupations such as gaming and poetry-reading which except by the seductions which they add, differ not from motionless indolence producing in addition to pretence[?] habitually renewed thirst, they produce an habitually renewed demand for liquors, and pretence for and perhaps the supposition of a demand for the use of intoxicating

ones.