★ Keep up to date with the latest news - subscribe to the Transcribe Bentham newsletter; Find a new page to transcribe in our list of Untranscribed Manuscripts
inferior to what they are in Prussia. (a)
Note
A (a) Boy of my Brother's who
before he had a month at nail-making got flogged t'other day
for making a knife. Not that at Crechoff there is any law against
ingenuity. but there is against stealing. and stealing time.
Yet
not having the mantle of legislation to screen me from the ridicule
of going beyond my last, I forbear to specify even what I have under
my eye, knowing that in Mr Arthur Young, a gentleman whom no one
can accuse of hiding his candle under a bushel, any body that
it might find an informant, who on this, as well as on so many
other important subjects, for every grain of information I could give
could give one thousand.
+There are two points
in politicks very hard
to compass: one is to
persuade legislators
that they do not
understand shoemaking
so well as shoemakers:
the other is to
persuade shoemakers
that they do not
understand legislating
so well as legislators.
The latter point
is particularly difficult
in our own dear
country: but the lat-
ter former is the hardest of
all things every
where.
But, without any disparagement to that gentleman,
for whose public-spirited labour, and well-directed talents, no man
can feel a greater regard than I do, there are other persons who, on
these same subjects, could for such a purpose, give still more and
better information than he, and would not be less communicative
I mean as before Mr Daily Advertiser and his brethren.
P. S. Upon turning once more to my pamphlet I find that it has
been through mistake that in addition to the interest which the
Governor was to have in the produce of the work, I attributed to
that Bill the same policy with regard to the Prisoner-workmen
This latter was only a suggestion of my own as given in that pamphlet
whether or no it was in the number of those adopted in the
subsequent I have totally forgotten. Be that as it may, I hope I
did the Bill no injury by the supposition the error was no
great injury.
Letter 12th
The point being settled, what trades the people may be
employed in, another question my Contractor would ask is, what power
he is to have put in his hands, as a means of persuading them to
betake themselves to those trades? The shortest way of answering this
question, will be to tell him what powers he shall not have. In the first place
then, he shall not have the power of starving them. "What then," you will
say perhaps, "do you imagine it likely that he should"? If I must speak
the truth, for my own part I don't imagine any such thing. But others
perhaps might. Besides my notion is that the Law, in guarding itself
against men ought to do just the contrary of what the Judge would do
trying them: especially when there is nothing to be lost by it. The business
you know of the Judge is to preserve them all honest till he is forced to
suspect the contrary: the business of the law is to conclude those
without exception to be the greatest Villains that can be imagined. My
Contractor therefore I make myself sure would starve them, a good
many of them at least if he were let alone he would starve of course all
all whom he could not make pay for their board together with something
for his trouble. But as I should get nothing by this economy, and might
|
Identifier: | JB/550/218/002 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 550.
|
|||
|---|---|---|---|
|
550 |
|||
|
218 |
|||
|
002 |
|||