ning copy, declining to go on with the work on any
consideration.

To account for this extraordinary conduct I was totally at a loss, as
he stopped at the part where the arguments on systems and principles of
government closed, and where the plan for the reduction of taxes, the
education of children, and the support of the poor and the aged begins;
and still more especially, as he had, at the time of his beginning to
print, and before he had seen the whole copy, offered a thousand pounds
for the copy-right, together with the future copy-right of the former
part of the Rights of Man. I told the person who brought me this offer
that I should not accept it, and wished it not to be renewed, giving him
as my reason, that though I believed the printer to be an honest man, I
would never put it in the power of any printer or publisher to suppress
or alter a work of mine, by making him master of the copy, or give to
him the right of selling it to any minister, or to any other person,
or to treat as a mere matter of traffic, that which I intended should
operate as a principle.

His refusal to complete the work (which he could not purchase) obliged
me to seek for another printer, and this of consequence would throw
the publication back till after the meeting of Parliament, otherways it
would have appeared that Mr. Pitt had only taken up a part of the plan
which I had more fully stated.

Whether that gentleman, or any other, had seen the work, or any part of
it, is more than I have authority to say. But the manner in which the
work was returned, and the particular time at which this was done, and
that after the offers he had made, are suspicious circumstances. I know
what the opinion of booksellers and publishers is upon such a case, but
as to my own opinion, I choose to make no declaration. There are many
ways by which proof sheets may be procured by other persons before a
work publicly appears; to which I shall add a certain circumstance,
which is,

A ministerial bookseller in Piccadilly who has been employed, as common
report says, by a clerk of one of the boards closely connected with
the ministry (the board of trade and plantation, of which Hawkesbury is
president) to publish what he calls my Life, (I wish his own life and
those of the cabinet were as good), used to have his books printed at
the same printing-office that I employed; but when the former part of
Rights of Man came out, he took his work away in dudgeon; and a