e former
paragraph, instead of applying them to the support of idle and
profligate Placemen and Pensioners.

Is it, then, any wonder that Placemen and Pensioners, and the whole
train of Court expectants, should become the promoters of Addresses,
Proclamations, and Prosecutions? or, is it any wonder that Corporations
and rotten Boroughs, which are attacked and exposed, both in the First
and Second Parts of _Rights of Man_, as unjust monopolies and public
nuisances, should join in the cavalcade? Yet these are the sources from
which Addresses have sprung. Had not such persons come forward to
oppose the _Rights of Man_, I should have doubted the efficacy of my
own writings: but those opposers have now proved to me that the blow was
well directed, and they have done it justice by confessing the smart.

The principal deception in this business of Addresses has been, that the
promoters of them have not come forward in their proper characters. They
have assumed to pass themselves upon the public as a part of the Public,
bearing a share of the burthen of Taxes, and acting for the public good;
whereas, they are in general that part of it that adds to the public
burthen, by living on the produce of the public taxes. They are to the
public what the locusts are to the tree: the burthen would be less, and
the prosperity would be greater, if they were shaken off.

"I do not come here," said Onslow, at the Surry County meeting, "as the
Lord Lieutenant and Custos Rotulorum of the county, but I come here as
a plain country gentleman." The fact is, that he came there as what he
was, and as no other, and consequently he came as one of the beings I
have been describing. If it be the character of a gentleman to be fed by
the public, as a pauper is by the parish, Onslow has a fair claim to the
title; and the same description will suit the Duke of Richmond, who led
the Address at the Sussex meeting. He also may set up for a gentleman.

As to the meeting in the next adjoining county (Kent), it was a scene of
disgrace. About two hundred persons met, when a small part of them drew
privately away from the rest, and voted an Address: the consequence of
which was that they got together by the ears, and produced a riot in the
very act of producing an Address to prevent Riots.

That the Proclamation and the Addresses have failed of their intended
effect, may be collected from the silence which the Government party
itself observes. The number of ad