every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose
care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate
pain, and eagerness for the nearest good. The blind are said to feel
with peculiar nicety. They who look but little into futurity, have,
perhaps, the quickest sensation of the present. A merchant's desire is
not of glory, but of gain; not of publick wealth, but of private
emolument; he is, therefore, rarely to be consulted about war and peace,
or any designs of wide extent and distant consequence.

Yet this, like other general characters, will sometimes fail. The
traders of Birmingham have rescued themselves from all imputation of
narrow selfishness, by a manly recommendation to parliament of the
rights and dignity of their native country.

To these men I do not intend to ascribe an absurd and enthusiastick
contempt of interest, but to give them the rational and just praise of
distinguishing real from seeming good; of being able to see through the
cloud of interposing difficulties, to the lasting and solid happiness of
victory and settlement.

Lest all these topicks of persuasion should fail, the greater actor of
patriotism has tried another, in which terrour and pity are happily
combined, not without a proper superaddition of that admiration which
latter ages have brought into the drama. The heroes of Boston, he tells
us, if the stamp act had not been repealed, would have left their town,
their port, and their trade, have resigned the splendour of opulence,
and quitted the delights of neighbourhood, to disperse themselves over
the country, where they would till the ground, and fish in the rivers,
and range the mountains, and be free.

These, surely, are brave words. If the mere sound of freedom can operate
thus powerfully, let no man, hereafter, doubt the story of the Pied
Piper. The removal of the people of Boston into the country, seems, even
to the congress, not only difficult in its execution, but important in
its consequences. The difficulty of execution is best known to the
Bostonians themselves; the consequence alas! will only be, that they
will leave good houses to wiser men.

Yet, before they quit the comforts of a warm home, for the sounding
something which they think better, he cannot be thought their enemy who
advises them, to consider well whether they shall find it. By turning
fishermen or hunters, woodmen or shepherds, they may become wild, but it
is not so easy t