[mainly in copyist’s hand]

1819 Nov 9 + +

Benthams

§.1. Seats & districts

3

By this means, while on the one hand subjects of importance, being thus shoved off to the close of the Session, fail of receiving a degree of discussion adequate to their importance; on the other hand others there commonly are, which, by the operation of the samecause stand compleatly excluded.

In England, even supposing the present plan adopted, it might be a considerable time before the inconvenience here in question had swelled to any sensible pitch: the higher, that is to say the most opulent classes, are those, by whom, even under the system of secresy and universality of suffrage the House could not fail of being principally filled; and among them, until the stimulus thus applied had had time to give birth to a better race, the station of the mind in the scale of appropriate aptitude would, in comparison of what it is in America, have to remain at a proportionably low ebb: the seats, in so far as they are filled by the class of persons called Country Gentlemen being in so large a proportion filled by a set of empty headed and scornful idlers, who, coming out with nothing but their votes, add no more to the length of the debates, than at the opera, they do to the length of the acts. But, under the proposed plan, the number of those, who, under such a system of Election, would feel themselvesqualified to open their mouths, would, of course, even from the first be in some proportion more considerable than at present: nor would many years elapse, before the quantity of appropriate aptitude, with the relative inconvenience thus shewn to be attached to this advantage, would have risen to a pitch, equal to any that it has ever reached as yet in the United States.

For the matter of fact here in question – I mean the effect of superabundance of speakers in producing delay of measures – I am indebted to an official person of the first distinction in the American Union, who, upon receiving from me some information of the present plan, was kindly eager to furnish me with the information, observing that the fact was of a sort to which a man could scarcely be expected to be led by general reasoning.