, teach posterity to sacrifice every private interest to
the advantage of their country.

[In this performance, which was first printed in the year 1739, Dr.
Johnson, "in a feigned inscription, supposed to have been found in
Norfolk, the country of sir Robert Walpole, then the obnoxious prime
minister of this country, inveighs against the Brunswick succession, and
the measures of government consequent upon it. To this supposed
prophecy, he added a commentory, making each expression apply to the
times, with warm anti-Hanoverian zeal."--Boswell's Life, i.]

OBSERVATIONS ON THE STATE OF AFFAIRS IN 1756 [23].

The time is now come, in which every Englishman expects to be informed
of the national affairs, and in which he has a right to have that
expectation gratified. For whatever may be urged by ministers, or those
whom vanity or interest make the followers of ministers, concerning the
necessity of confidence in our governours, and the presumption of
prying, with profane eyes, into the recesses of policy, it is evident,
that this reverence can be claimed only by counsels yet unexecuted, and
projects suspended in deliberation. But when a design has ended in
miscarriage or success, when every eye, and every ear, is witness to
general discontent, or general satisfaction, it is then a proper time to
disentangle confusion, and illustrate obscurity; to show by what causes
every event was produced, and in what effects it is likely to terminate;
to lay down, with distinct particularity, what rumour always huddles in
general exclamations, or perplexes by undigested narratives; to show
whence happiness or calamity is derived, and whence it may be expected;
and honestly to lay before the people, what inquiry can gather of the
past, and conjecture can estimate of the future.

The general subject of the present war is sufficiently known. It is
allowed, on both sides, that hostilities began in America, and that the
French and English quarrelled about the boundaries of their settlements,
about grounds and rivers, to which, I am afraid, neither can show any
other right than that of power, and which neither can occupy but by
usurpation, and the dispossession of the natural lords and original
inhabitants. Such is the contest, that no honest man can heartily wish
success to either party.

It may, indeed, be alleged, that the Indians have granted large tracts
of land both to one and to the other; but these grants can add little to