1819 July 8 + C

To Erskine

Lett. 5. Erskines Reform ?

Lett. 6. E. Anti-Reformist ?

Safe experiments triable

Real Graduality Ballot

1

I have shewn {Your Lordship} the sort of graduality desired and proposed where there is no sincerity /sincerity being absent, not at home/, and where insincerity is /has/ covered itself with a varnish if not already transparent happily capable of being rendered so with very little trouble. I will now shew Your Lordship what sort of a thing graduality would be, if in the source from whence the proposal came there were any such thing as sincerity. Add to graduality from the calendar of virtues kept and consulted[?] by Lord Grey and others, judiciousness prudence, moderation temperance with et cæteras upon et cæteras

If I say at the bottom of any of these proposals for graduality there were a grain of sincerity, nothing would be easier than to make proof of it. Danger of injury /Injury/ to person or property or person or both is /if individent compose/ the only mischief /effect/ that can be ascribed to secrecy of suffrage, universality of suffrage equality of effect and value as between suffrage and suffrage and annual dismissibility of representatives to those features /the four elements/ of reform, taken jointly or severally, when indication of special mischief is substituted to a cry of wild, visionary /“wild and visionary/, and theoretical or “absurd, visionary and senseless, and those whom despair, through lack of argument, had /has/ transformed into parrots, have retransformed themselves into men.

No man will have the weakness to conceive – no man will have the assurance to pretend to conceive, that out of the 658 seats the filling of half a dozen, of a dozen, or though it were several dozen of seats were filled upon the principle of radical reform, as exhibited in these its elements – one, two, three or even all of them – any practical diminution /defalcation/ would be produced from the security afforded by the power remaining to the rest. {No man will have the weakness to conceive no man will have the assurance to pretend to conceive that by /either from/ the universal suffrage men of half a dozen districts in the character of voters headed or not headed by the half dozen Representatives chosen by them sit in Honourable House, any serious fear of being slaughtered or subdued would be entertained by the Duke of York or /and/ the Duke of Wellington with /or/ the 100,000 men kept up under their command for the more effectual preservation of our liberties /English liberty/:

Taken