30 Jan y 1809

Peines

Two other objects which on this same occasion appear to have been

stood confounded in his mind are the same two objects which

at the outset it had been necessary for him to distinguish

and which at that period he accordingly did not distinguish

. the two parts of antagonizing parts (I mean)

which his considered his supposed system of " policy" as composed, viz. the

" Laws" themselves viz. the statutes themselves, and the mode in which they were administered:

administered i.e. in nine instances out of ten, defeated by

those when provision, according to the constitution it was and is to

execute them. Here these two Here in the

conclusion two objects at first so carefully

distinguished, become confounded: the quality of "lenity"

which if ascribable to either part of the system

will is be ascribable to the administration, i.e. to the non-execution of these " sanguinary" laws, is ascribed by him to these sanguinary laws

themselves: and lenity being in his conception or at least in his

expression a quality indisputably inherent in these sanguinary law viz. in

virtue of their sanguinariness, what he has to do with all that

running for him it is to " vindicate"

it: i.e. vindicate it from the charge of being excessive.

But in fact (what by this time he had forgotten it escaped him)

the charge which by which he sued at the outset the statement

supposition

made by him he stood engaged to prove in relation to "the laws' in question, was is the charge

of " cruelty': and this charge, after a momentary)

nod, during which he was dreaming that " Comity", not

"cruelty"-) was the charge he had to vindicate them against, he once

once more, as soon as he is awake and by the argument which he had

chalked out to himself undertakes to vindicate

against it, if not the laws themselves when taken in the abstract, what

is to pay practical result comes to the same thing, the supposed

system of voting of which they are a supposed

part.