If from analogy any honest and instructive use had on this occasion been intended to be made by people of different countries professing the same persuasion in these our times a much more relevant and instructive lesson would be afforded than any that could be drawn from even the same country at such distant times.

If in Ireland, where three fourths or more of the population is comprised of Catholics, no ill treatment has within the memory of man been bestowed by Catholics as such upon Protestants as such, while in the same country so much ill treatment has on other accounts been bestowed [by]

MS ‘upon’.

the people of each of those persuasions upon those of the other, it is (it may be said) because the power of doing so with impunity is not in their hands.

But in Countries where the Catholic is the predominant religion and in which at the same time as in our island, barbarity on the score of mere catholicism was by Catholics exercised by and according to law and in the Catholic countries in which the exercise of those barbarities was in those times most conspicuous, of no such barbarities has any instance (it would be found) occurred for a long course of years.

Even

Above this paragraph there is a pencil note ‘Note’. In the text at this point Bentham has noted ‘(a)’.

in Spain I have been assured if I may depend upon an assurance given me by persons fully informed and of the most respectable character no instance of a capital execution for any offence against religion had occurred within these 22 or 23 years.

In the capital of Mexico, if I may believe a gentleman of distinction in his own country by whom the capital of that kingdom was lately visited,

Possibly the Hon. Andrew Cochrane Johnstone (1767-1834), soldier, politician and adventurer, and Bentham’s tenant and neighbour in Queens Square Place. Cochrane Johnston had visited Mexico and it is clear that he had given Bentham information about that country; see Correspondence, vol. viii, pp. 61-2. Between 1808 and 1810 Bentham had entertained the notion of visiting Mexico himself, but his plans came to nothing.

he was by the Grand Inquisitor himself conducted into every apartment of the prison of the Inquisition that for the purpose of the being assured by occular demonstration of the non-existence of any person in the state of prisoner within its walls.