[clx. 344]

1822 July 11

Constitut. Code Rationale

Securities Counterforce

4 Legal responsibility

5. Moral responsibility

Moral Responsibility

Thus stands the matter in regard to legal responsibility responsibility to punishment at the hands of the possessors /administrators/ of the power of the legal sanction.

Look now to moral responsibility - responsibility to the purpose of eventual exposure to the punitive power of the Public Opinion Tribunal, administrators /possessors/ of the force and influence of the popular or say moral sanction: the power that is to say /and in particular the power/ of the democratical sanction of that same invisible yet not the less efficiently /effectively/ operative tribunal: a tribunal like the Vehmic invisible; but, like that not the less operative. To responsibility /punishment/ to not altogether ineffective responsibility in this shape /punishment in a certain shape/, not only in representative democracy the possessors but even in an absolute Monarchy, the possessor of the supreme operative power are capable of being responsible /standing exposed/. In fact In this shape in this sense is /are/ the most compleatly absolute Monarchy the Monarch is always to a certain degree responsible, and feels himself so to be: though in some Monarchies at some times so faint /feeble/ has /such has been the feebleness of/ this responsibility been in the character of a counterforce to the powers of government in the highest grade, that the effect of it in respect of a cause of mitigation to the evils of misrule - of depredation and oppression - in experience has hardly been perceptible. has seldom in any determinate degree or shape been perceptible.