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Front Page Titles (by Subject) Bentham to Sir Charles Bunbury. - The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 11 (Memoirs of Bentham Part II and Analytical Index)
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Bentham to Sir Charles Bunbury. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 11 (Memoirs of Bentham Part II and Analytical Index) [1843]Edition used:The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 11.
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Bentham to Sir Charles Bunbury.“Dear Sir,—Crimes, distinguished by the name of unnatural, are endemial, not to say universal, on board the Hulks in both places, Woolwich as well as Portsmouth. As the Hulks are emptied of the contents, these crimes flow out with them, and propagate themselves in patriam populumque. At Woolwich, an initiation of this sort stands in the place of garnish, and is exacted with equal rigour. This fact is put out of doubt by indubitable evidence. Not only such things are, but, as the Mayor of Portsmouth, Sir John Carter, in a letter now before me, very sensibly observes, from the very nature of the receptacle, such things ever must be. Such are the abominations of which Lord Grosvenor has obtained, and Lord Pelham and Mr Addington decreed, the perpetuation and diffusion. The official lord has had notice of them over and over again: to the pious lord, it does not seem very likely to have been a secret. Query, in a court, able and willing to do substantial justice, who is most guilty of them: he who practises them upon an individual scale, or he who protects and establishes them upon a public scale? This is a query I propose submitting to the public. Know you any just cause or impediment that should prevent me? or will you take the task off my hands? “The long letter you favoured me with is still in my mind’s eye. Will you make the experiment upon your noble and pious friend? Give him legal notice of what he knows already, and ask him whether he still chooses it shall be so? Alas, no! Your heart fails you: I see you shrinking from it. “You misconceived me: the piety of the noble lord was never with me the matter in dispute: the question was, and is, respecting the connexion between piety and morality,—if public morality be morality in his noble breast. This, in my heretical view of the matter, is the end: piety, useful only as a means, leading to that end. For, except through the medium of morality, who is to be the better for a man’s piety? Man, I suppose, if anybody: not the Almighty, I presume. “As to your potent friend, Mr Addington, on this as on other occasions, he waits to be determined, as he has hitherto been determined, by the greater uneasiness: by the greater force of parliamentary and closet pressure. To all considerations of good faith, and public morality, and public decorum on those grounds, he has been reported ‘callous’: such was the expressive word, and from a surgeon who probed him to the quick. Candid, honey-minded man! How pure his public spirit! How passionate his desire to do whatever were for the best! What professions! What effusions! The judgment of Sir Evan Nepean could not stand against the torrent. Does yours dare encounter it? Mistake me not: Nepean was not the surgeon spoken of. As for the man of might, his perpetual smiles are entailed upon every man whom it is possible he should ever have to count with: he makes himself amends upon a defenceless and deserted man like me. “Good faith, public morality, constitution,—all alike sacred to your potent friends. ‘Plea for the Constitution,’—a pamphlet of which you will not bear—dare—(which shall I say?) to read so much as the title-page. The Attorney-general was ‘shocked’ at it. To a man who was not yet ‘callous,’ what can be more shocking than truths at once disgraceful and incontestible! The mention made of himself in the Preface he was not displeased with: the truth of the fact he admitted, expressly or tacitly, to Romilly. Thank me—yes, even me,—for the Transportation-facilitating Act! Thanks to what they have not yet destroyed of the Constitution, it is in the power of a worm, while writhing under the foot of the oppressor, to give motion to the sceptre. I have not done with them yet by a great deal. The Attorney-general, if he is to be believed, would be favourable if he durst. “Sir C. Bunbury has, or at least had, a project for forming a posse to storm the minister in the closet. Wilberforce, will he join or head the posse? Wilberforce and H. Thornton, are they good Samaritans, or are they Priest and Levite?” |

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