1820 Feb. 16

Radicalism not dangerous

III.

II. Ireland

3

Text or note continued

So far as concerns wider[?] sense of security on the part of individuals Under such a Constitution and such laws the […?] executed under a Constitution in which all power is real and all restraint upon it sham given to those laws by which security is destroyed is to produce to the peril of all zealous friends /those who are secure and […?] in its service[?]/ to maintain[?] that sense of insecurity which under an undisguised despotism could not have place: for under a special censorship this much at least of individual suffering is excluded.

For The sense I have for so many years had of my own condition I can not but entertain a correspondent sense of the condition of all those who joining /agreeing/ with me in the same assertion join with me in the same endeavours. As against those by whom the powers of government are exercised more for property, & for liberty or for life has any sense of any thing better than continual danger been present to my breast.

Not many weeks before his death, Romilly, for about thirty[?] years my intimate friend sent to desire to speak with Mr Bentham says he, stop the sale of Church of Englandism immediately or as I am as sure of as I am of my existence you will be prosecuted, and if prosecuted I am as sure as I am of my existence you will be convicted. These as repeated immediately after to common friends who on these were his very words. What /Anything/ further passed belongs not to the present purpose. In addition to the endeavour and the hope of being /becoming/ more or useful to mankind[?] after my death and the esteem and affection /sentiments produced[?] to the Church/ of a few friends by that hope such as predicted to me by my lamented friend is the only contribution I can have a prospect for more than half a century of labours expended in that hope.

The further /deeper/ I have penetrated into the recesses of that Constitution, the more clear and strong the perception I have obtained of its compleat rottenness in every part and especially those in relation to which its purity[?] has been the object of most indefatigable boasting the more compleatly satisfied of the necessity of democratical ascendancy[?] and its instrument radical reform and of the same time of the sufficiency[?] of that same instrument, without any such drastic remedy as pure democracy would be when applied to a subject so constituted.