1819 Mar. +

To Erskine

II. Whig Merits

§.3. J.B. Remarks

12

6

10

Irish nation, and those by which, in 1789, the aristocratical body, composed of the 80,000 French Noblesse, gave up, all in one day, so large a portion of that power under the weight of which the thirty millions had for so many centuries been crushed.

To return to the Whigs. Notwithstanding this unchangeable determination to keep what power they had, such, as early as the year 1780, was their appetite for that which they had not, and so deep the game which it was the effect of that appetite to make them play for it – that, in 1780, under the lead of Charles Fox, that prince of gamesters, to which Brookes’s was supplied one gaming-table and S t Stephens another, they had actually been brought to continue in their adherence to him, after he had signed a declaration in favour of annuality of election, and even of unlimited universality of suffrage. +

To the next page, p. 12.

From the next page p. 12

As to the one party, that on their part from that time and earlier, down to the present, the show of desire of reform, never has been any thing more than a show – that it never has been either their endeavour, or their desire, to help to bestow upon the subject many any the least particle of those means of security which it was in their power to withhold, among the propositions, which, by Your Lordships defence of them I have been engaged to endeavour to prove: to prove more to the conviction than I fear to the satisfaction of a Noble Lord, whose eloquence has lifted him up, as well as so many of his admirers, so much above the sphere of the old philosophers, whose chief study as well as difficulty, was, as he informs us, to know himself.