respectful silence of those who wait upon your pleasure ought to be as
powerful with you as the call of those who require your service as their
right. Some, without doors, affect to feel hurt for your dignity,
because they suppose that menaces are held out to you. Justify their
good opinion by showing that no menaces are necessary to stimulate you
to your duty. But, Sir, whilst we may sympathize with them in one point
who sympathize with us in another, we ought to attend no less to those
who approach us like men, and who, in the guise of petitioners, speak to
us in the tone of a concealed authority. It is not wise to force them to
speak out more plainly what they plainly mean.--But the petitioners are
violent. Be it so. Those who are least anxious about your conduct are
not those that love you most. Moderate affection and satiated enjoyment
are cold and respectful; but an ardent and injured passion is tempered
up with wrath, and grief, and shame, and conscious worth, and the
maddening sense of violated right. A jealous love lights his torch from
the firebrands of the furies. They who call upon you to belong _wholly_
to the people are those who wish you to return to your _proper_
home,--to the sphere of your duty, to the post of your honor, to the
mansion-house of all genuine, serene, and solid satisfaction. We have
furnished to the people of England (indeed we have) some real cause of
jealousy. Let us leave that sort of company which, if it does not
destroy our innocence, pollutes our honor; let us free ourselves at once
from everything that can increase their suspicions and inflame their
just resentment; let us cast away from us, with a generous scorn, all
the love-tokens and symbols that we have been vain and light enough to
accept,--all the bracelets, and snuff-boxes, and miniature pictures, and
hair devices, and all the other adulterous trinkets that are the pledges
of our alienation and the monuments of our shame. Let us return to our
legitimate home, and all jars and all quarrels will be lost in embraces.
Let the commons in Parliament assembled be one and the same thing with
the commons at large. The distinctions that are made to separate us are
unnatural and wicked contrivances. Let us identify, let us incorporate
ourselves with the people. Let us cut all the cables and snap the chains
which tie us to an unfaithful shore, and enter the friendly harbor that
shoots far out into the main its moles and jetties to recei