hile you pretend not only zeal for the public good, but a due
veneration for the person of the king. But all men who can see an inch
before them, may easily detect those gross fallacies. That it is
necessary for men in your circumstances to pretend both, is granted you;
for without them there could be no ground to raise a faction. But I
would ask you one civil question, what right has any man among you, or
any association of men (to come nearer to you), who, out of parliament,
cannot be considered in a public capacity, to meet as you daily do in
factious clubs, to vilify the government in your discourses, and to
libel it in all your writings? Who made you judges in Israel? Or how is
it consistent with your zeal for the public welfare, to promote
sedition? Does your definition of loyal, which is to serve the king
according to the laws, allow you the licence of traducing the executive
power with which you own he is invested? You complain that his majesty
has lost the love and confidence of his people; and by your very urging
it, you endeavour what in you lies to make him lose them. All good
subjects abhor the thought of arbitrary power, whether it be in one or
many: if you were the patriots you would seem, you would not at this
rate incense the multitude to assume it; for no sober man can fear it,
either from the king's disposition or his practice; or even, where you
would odiously lay it, from his ministers. Give us leave to enjoy the
government and the benefit of laws under which we were born, and which
we desire to transmit to our posterity. You are not the trustees of the
public liberty; and if you have not right to petition in a crowd, much
less have you to intermeddle in the management of affairs; or to arraign
what you do not like, which in effect is everything that is done by the
king and council. Can you imagine that any reasonable man will believe
you respect the person of his majesty, when it is apparent that your
seditious pamphlets are stuffed with particular reflections on him? If
you have the confidence to deny this, it is easy to be evinced from a
thousand passages, which I only forbear to quote, because I desire they
should die and be forgotten. I have perused many of your papers; and to
show you that I have, the third part of your "No-Protestant Plot" is
much of it stolen from your dead author's pamphlet, called the "Growth
of Popery;" as manifestly as Milton's "Defence of the English People" is
from Buch