f the vessels inflicted personal
chastisement on him, for some impertinent comments he saw fit to make on
the honest tar's vessel; and, this being matter of intense interest to
the public mind, he went into a detail of all the evolutions of the
combat. Other men may pull each other's noses, and inflict kicks and
blows, without the world's caring a straw about it; but the editorial
interest is too intense to be overlooked in this manner. A bulletin of
the battle was published; the editor speaking of himself always in the
plural, out of excess of modesty, and to avoid egotism(!) in three
columns which were all about himself, using such expressions as
these:--"_We_ now struck _our_ antagonist a blow with _our_ fist, and
followed this up with a kick of _our_ foot, and otherwise _we_ made an
assault on him that he will have reason to remember to his dying day."
Now, these expressions, for a time, set all the old women in the colony
against the editor, until he went into an elaborate explanation, showing
that his modesty was so painfully sensitive that he could not say _I_ on
any account, though he occupied three more columns of his paper in
explaining the state of _our_ feelings. But, at first, the cry went
forth that the battle had been of _two_ against _one_; and _that_ even
the simple-minded colonists set down as somewhat cowardly. So much for
talking about _we_ in the bulletin of a single combat!

The political, effects produced by this paper, however, were much the
most material part of its results. Whenever it offended and disgusted
its readers by its dishonesty, selfishness, vulgarity, and lies--and it
did this every week, being a hebdomadal--it recovered the ground it had
lost by beginning to talk of 'the people' and their rights. This the
colonists could not withstand. All their sympathies were enlisted in
behalf of him who thought so much of their rights; and, at the very
moment he was trampling on these rights, to advance his own personal
views, and even treating them with contempt by uttering the trash he
did, they imagined that he and his paper in particular, and its
doctrines in general, were a sort of gift from Heaven to form the
palladium of their precious liberties!

The great theory advanced by this editorial tyro, was, that a majority
of any community had a right to do as it pleased. The governor early
saw, not only the fallacies, but the danger of this doctrine; and he
wrote several communications himsel