. They have indulged their
imaginations, which have always been sufficiently fruitful in satire and
invective, by representing them as men in whom all regard to decency or
reputation was extinguished, men who no longer submitted to wear the
mask of hypocrisy, or thought the esteem of mankind worth their care;
who had ceased to profess any regard to the welfare of their country, or
any desire of advancing the publick happiness; and who no longer desired
any other effects of their power, than the security of themselves and
the conquest of their opponents.

Such, sir, has been the character of the ministry, which, by the
incessant endeavours of these disinterested patriots, has been carried
to the remotest corners of the empire, and disseminated through all the
degrees of the people. Every man, whom they could enlist among their
pupils, whom they could persuade to see with their eyes, rather than his
own, and who was not so stubborn as to require proofs of their
assertions, and reasons of their conduct; every man who, having no
sentiments of his own, hoped to become important by echoing those of his
instructors, was taught to think and to say, that the court was filled
with open corruption; that the greatest and the wisest men of the
kingdom set themselves publickly to sale, and held an open traffick for
votes and places; that whoever engaged in the party of the minister,
declared himself ready to support his cause against truth, and reason,
and conviction, and was no longer under the restraint of shame or
virtue.

These assertions, hardy as they were, they endeavoured to support by
instances of measures, which they described as having no other tendency,
than to advance the court to absolute authority, to enslave the nation,
or to betray it: and more happily would they have propagated their
system, and much sooner would they have obtained a general declaration
of the people in their favour, had they been able to have produced a
motion like this.

Should the influence of these men increase, should they grow secure in
the possession of their power, by any new methods of deluding the
people, what wonderful expedients, what unheard-of methods of government
may not be expected from them? What degrees of violence may they not be
supposed to practise, who have flushed their new authority by a motion
which was never projected since the first existence of our government,
or offered by the most arbitrary minister in all the confi