any decent man, think himself in clanger.

It may be doubted, whether the name of a patriot can be fairly given, as
the reward of secret satire, or open outrage. To fill the newspapers
with sly hints of corruption and intrigue, to circulate the Middlesex
Journal, and London Pacquet, may, indeed, be zeal; but it may, likewise,
be interest and malice. To offer a petition, not expected to be granted;
to insult a king-with a rude remonstrance, only because there is no
punishment for legal insolence, is not courage, for there is no danger;
nor patriotism, for it tends to the subversion of order, and lets
wickedness loose upon the land, by destroying the reverence due to
sovereign authority.

It is the quality of patriotism to be jealous and watchful, to observe
all secret machinations, and to see publick dangers at a distance. The
true lover of his country is ready to communicate his fears, and to
sound the alarm, whenever he perceives the approach of mischief. But he
sounds no alarm, when there is no enemy; he never terrifies his
countrymen till he is terrified himself. The patriotism, therefore, may
be justly doubted of him, who professes to be disturbed by
incredibilities; who tells, that the last peace was obtained by bribing
the princess of Wales; that the king is grasping at arbitrary power;
and, that because the French, in the new conquests, enjoy their own
laws, there is a design at court of abolishing, in England, the trial by
juries.

Still less does the true patriot circulate opinions which he knows to be
false. No man, who loves his country, fills the nation with clamorous
complaints, that the protestant religion is in danger, because "popery
is established in the extensive province of Quebec," a falsehood so open
and shameless, that it can need no confutation among those who know that
of which it is almost impossible for the most unenlightened zealot to be
ignorant:

That Quebec is on the other side of the Atlantick, at too great a
distance to do much good or harm to the European world:

That the inhabitants, being French, were always papists, who are
certainly more dangerous as enemies than as subjects:

That though the province be wide, the people are few, probably not so
many as may be found in one of the larger English counties:

That persecution is not more virtuous in a protestant than a papist; and
that, while we blame Lewis the fourteenth, for his dragoons and his
galleys, we ought, when power co