1821. April 2

Codification Offer

'7 Foreigner why

As by sinister interest moral aptitude may be affected and deteriorated, so, by prejudices, interest-begotten or otherwise derived, may intellectual aptitude. In any prejudices peculiar to the country in question, the foreigner, by the supposition, has no share. From prejudices imbibed in his own foreign country, no danger to the one in question can arise. In none of these prejudices will those persons, from whom alone the Code of his framing can derive its binding force, have any share.

The national prejudices - the erroneous preconceived opinions derived from nationality,- whatever they may be, which may have exercised an influence more or less prejudicial on his work, will find ready prepared for them, a check, composed of the prepossessions, reasonable and erroneous together, of those on whom the work will have to depend for the acceptance given to it; at their hands it will not fail to receive any alterations which in the name of amendments they may be pleased to make in it.

In the case where the draughtsman is a native, this check, useful as it can not be denied to be, has no place.

(a) When Mill's History of British India first came out, it being advertised that

the author had never set foot on any part of the country of which he gave the

history - "What instruction can be got from this book by any of us who have

[...?] or lived there was a question generally [...?] It had long made its

appearance, before the acknowledgments became generally that no man who had ever

been there possessed so clear, correct, or extensive a conception of the state

and history of that country as the historian who had never set foot on any part

of it.