temper has been
inoculated. The author is sensible of it, and we lament it together.
This distemper is alone sufficient to take away considerably from the
benefits of our constitution and situation, and perhaps to render their
continuance precarious. If these evil dispositions should spread much
farther, they must end in our destruction; for nothing can save a people
destitute of public and private faith. However, the author, for the
present state of things, has extended the charge by much too widely; as
men are but too apt to take the measure of all mankind from their own
particular acquaintance. Barren as this age may be in the growth of
honor and virtue, the country does not want, at this moment, as strong,
and those not a few examples, as were ever known, of an unshaken
adherence to principle, and attachment to connection, against every
allurement of interest. Those examples are not furnished by the great
alone; nor by those, whose activity in public affairs may render it
suspected that they make such a character one of the rounds in their
ladder of ambition; but by men more quiet, and more in the shade, on
whom an unmixed sense of honor alone could operate. Such examples indeed
are not furnished in great abundance amongst those who are the subjects
of the author's panegyric. He must look for them in another camp. He who
complains of the ill effects of a divided and heterogeneous
administration, is not justifiable in laboring to render odious in the
eyes of the public those men, whose principles, whose maxims of policy,
and whose personal character, can alone administer a remedy to this
capital evil of the age: neither is he consistent with himself, in
constantly extolling those whom he knows to be the authors of the very
mischief of which he complains, and which the whole nation feels so
deeply.

The persons who are the objects of his dislike and complaint are many
of them of the first families, and weightiest properties, in the
kingdom; but infinitely more distinguished for their untainted honor,
public and private, and their zealous, but sober attachment to the
constitution of their country, than they can be by any birth, or any
station. If they are the friends of any one great man rather than
another, it is not that they make his aggrandizement the end of their
union; or because they know him to be the most active in caballing for
his connections the largest and speediest emoluments. It is because they
know him