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OBSTACLES Indolence Insensibility to evils remote
A great obstacle to the perfection of Legislation the Legislative
System is that it's operations have scarce ever
hitherto been + performed but upon the spur of the
+
nor from the nature
of things can well
be expected to be, at
least for a long time
performed
occasion upon the press under the actual sufferance or at least
the Imminent danger of the mischief of which it is
meant to guard against in future: that is, things
are done but at the very time, of all others,
in which they are least likely to be done well.
The reason of all this, is, that there is no encouragement
& there are many discouragements to Legislation
from acting but at any other Season — The
gratitude to the Physician is in proportion to the
acerbity grievousness of the disease: but here, there being
by the supposition no disease, in consequence,
there is no gratitude. Suppose for example
a Minister, Legislator having no matter by what miracle how, attained the
gift of seeing reading into not only actual but possible futurity
should know for certain that in the year 1872 — unless something were done a
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to prevent it certain Page, having insinuated himself into a criminal
familiarity with the Queen regnant then
unmarried, by his influence & the discontents consequent
upon its capricious exertion, should plunge the nation
into the miseries of cruel war — Suppose that
in consequence, he were to propose a Law, to extend
the provisions in the Stat. Ed. 3d against
& to make void any the marriage
of a Queen
regnant without consent
of Parliament.
the defiling of Females related to the Crown to this case:
It is a great chance that he would be looked upon meet with the comment whether that Legislator would
of as a Cassandra & that no body would hear him
be heard — Men in Office would think it
good Logic to ply him with, the improbability of
any princess of his Majesty's royal line so far
forgetting her dignity as to &c &c, to observe that
if any thereof which God forbid should call
in another , it would then be time enough
&c &c & other copies of this act which prove
with which some
men will never tire
though
with equal force against every tradition of the
power of the Crown that has been made, or that
shall be made hereafter. The people seeing what
they now see with so much pleasure, the Royal
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jeremy bentham |
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