JB/116/576/001

Click Here To Edit

Letter 2

Decr 1802

XVI. Improved prisons

Observations on No 8. Thus far the worthy Magistrate. A supposition unquestionably though
tacitly assumed in the hypothetical offer thus made by the him
worthy Magistrate, is—that on the other part some regard
would be paid to the rules of common honesty; and
that the County would not be made bankrupt to him, as
Parliament has been made to me others: and that after his
proposal had been accepted, his capital with the concurrence
of the accessors advanced upon the faith of it,
and Acts of Parliament, of necessity, obtained for it, he
would not have to see the execution of it set down
in for the Greek calends, by any such person as
the predecessor of the "great person": he assures Your Lordship
will find him afterwards speaking of he is so afraid of flattering—not to
speak of successors.

To The gentleman would himself it would have
seemed, that he in making any such offer he knew what
he was about:—but the "great person" would have
known better things. The more beneficial to the public
he had, in his own view of the matter, made his terms
the greater more appalling the scorn with which he would might have been
looked down upon, by the intuitive and super-calculative wisdom of such high personages:+—and
if on any other occasion he had ever been guilty
of thinking for the public, this too would might have been numbered
among his "flights".

+ after having seen
his terms relinquished
after learning
terns were too high from
one great person, he would
might have been
they are not high enough
from another:
that his terms were too
high, he might learn
from another that they
were too low; or
from each of them that
they were too high
and too low at the
same time:—

What will become of the worthy Magistrate, whose
existence, to judge by the terror he seems to be in of being
prosecuted for flattery, seems to depend upon the breath of
the great person's nostrils? If a wish to submitt to
a limited deduction from a sum of £12000 a year
for maintaining a thousand prisoners creates doubts of sanity,
what

Identifier: | JB/116/576/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 116.
Date_1	1802-12	Marginal Summary Numbering	33
Box	116	Main Headings	panopticon versus new south wales
Folio number	576	Info in main headings field	letter 2
Image	001	Titles
Category	correspondence	Number of Pages	1
Recto/Verso	recto	Page Numbering	f34
Penner	jeremy bentham	Watermarks
Marginals	jeremy bentham	Paper Producer
Corrections		Paper Produced in Year
Notes public	letter was never sent; see note 8 to letter 1747, vol. 7	ID Number	38109
Box Contents