1823 Feb. 4 Trip. H. to Q.A. Introduction

What I have to state to you is a most violent political disorder, and a remedy

which I am about to endeavour to apply to it: what I have to solicit at your

hands, is your assistance towards the application of that same remedy.

In this disorder you will see the necessity just alluded to. It has two

distinguishable branches public and private, but so intertwined as to be

inseparable: and, the material thing is © that the same remedy applies to both:

nor are either of them susceptible of any other.

The root of the private disorder is in the public one: in that state of

universal insecurity which as you so well know, is the necessary fruit and

accompaniment of a government such as ours.

Out of this universal and constantly existing evil, grows at this particular

time a particular and most horrible danger: a danger of a domestic, and in that

way of a comparatively private nature: but magnified into a public and universal

danger by the situation of the family:© a danger of civil war, and at the

conclusion of it that of the country's falling into the power of a monster, more

atrociously cruel and mischievous, than is perhaps to be seen in any page of

history:© a monster to whose already experienced and notorious appetite for

carnage, and delight in the spectacle of human tortures, the rest of the

reigning family, together with my own in connection with it, would be among the

earliest and surest victims .

On each vacancy, a Mahometan throne, I need not inform you, is among the

brothers of the last Sovereign, the object of a general scramble. Of the sons of

the reigning Sovereign of Tripoli, this monster Mahomet Caramalli, is the

eldest: some traits of him you will see presently.