JB/058/442/001

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11 July 1805
Evidence

Hereditary or elective, the cheek of the legislator, if he has any
generous blood in his veins, will with shame, at feeling
the threat of the Lord to Rabshakeh perpetually verified in his person, at
feeling the hook of the lawyer for ever in his nose,
at being the thoughts of his keeping himself in a state of perpetual pupilage schoolboyship under a Master
whose existence depends upon the keeping him in a state of perpetual
servility helplessness and ignorance.

Yes, yet indeed one of those days sooner or later (and can it be too soon?)
he will awake: he will awake out of his long and disgraceful slumber:
he will awake to wisdom and knowledge independence: he will awake, and burst his
chains; chains forged by Ignorance in the career of Imposture.

It is not merely as a source in the character of misery, or misery to men
in the capacity of suitors, or having the need without the power to become
suitors, that jurisprudence in any state, but above all in its English state
is pernicious. It is pernicious to men, as men, to men in the
capacity of mere readers. It is pernicious, if any thing in this character can be
pernicious – it is pernicious to men in the character of a source
of poison to the mental frame: to the moral branch of it, by presenting
to them a perpetual source of fraud and imposture as a perpetual
object of admiration; to the intellectual branch by perpetually
bespeaking (and with what unhappy disastrous success let the state of the public
mind declare) by perpetually bespeaking the same sentiment of
reverence for a shapeless and sordid mass of absurdity and nonsense.

The writers on moral subjects among the Jesuits had become proverbial
in the 17th Century for insincerity of argumentation. But should ever the film
of prejudice be removed eyes of Englishmen be cleared from the film of prejudice, they
will perceive to their shame,⊞ ⊞ that priest craft has been outdone by lawyer craft, that the most immoral book that ever issued from a priest's
pen, is strict and moral and severe, when compared with an ordinary treatise of English jurisprudence.
Had Pascal lived drawn his pen on English ground and in the present age, he would have
found in the subtleties of Enobar or and an object worthy of respect, in more deserving of respect than
comparison of censure where compared with the sophistry and sycophantism of Blackstone.

Identifier: | JB/058/442/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 58.
Date_1	1805-07-11	Marginal Summary Numbering	<…>
Box	058	Main Headings	evidence
Folio number	442	Info in main headings field	evidence
Image	001	Titles
Category	text sheet	Number of Pages	1
Recto/Verso	recto	Page Numbering
Penner	jeremy bentham	Watermarks	1800
Marginals	jeremy bentham	Paper Producer
Corrections		Paper Produced in Year	1800
Notes public		ID Number	19111
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