21 Dec 1802 Letter 3 (2

they might submit to the calamity thus passing upon them —

a murrain among Convicts, as they would to any other calamity, such as

a murrain among the cattle: they might look upon it as a sort of momentary

and passing scourge, and ascribe it rather to a want an absence

of thought rather than to any such exuberance and profundity and for

a construction an interpretation to their effect of this evil,

surely my Lord, there could not be any great want of grounds. of

thought. But if As it was not in the nature of the case that

gentlemen thus plagued should find out what his Grace the noble

arbiter of their fate had in view in plaguing them, much less is

it in proof or in probability that his Grace should ever have condescended

to bestow upon them any such information of himself. Were

even the fact of proposed and anxious concealment out of the

question, no man surely who should have read this letter,

can have conceived it possible that it should have been the

intention of +

+ any person who either

argued it or wrote it, or if there were any such

other person other person, thought about it 2 It is converted

into a plan, only by the very fabrication of it the noble

writer that the contents of it or any part of them should

ever travell a safe beyond the

two floors from between which it passed. one of

which to the other it was transmitted. [If this be true, and if the

knowledge of the existence of a plan be necessary to the execution of it on

the part of those who by that plan are to be drawn or led to

execute it, a

matter result

in no small degree beyond any natural course of expectation

of no small degree of response will be sure to follow. The

accomplishment of this design

of this high-born and super-official design for its

accomplishment will after all be due in no small degree to such

an homunico as myself. If it be to his Grace alone that

the law behest of his Grace is indebted for its conception,

origination to me, my Lord, (Your Lordship starts and

smiles) Yes to me, my Lord to the poor worm

Your Lordship he treads on, that the law is indebted for its

promulgation. What irregularities anomalities what

vicissitudes will sometimes be displayd by the tide which

manifests itself in the affairs of men."

How

whimsical and paradoxical and unexpected will be the contrasts

and