l and the lamp-iron.

Formerly your affairs were your own concern only. We felt for them as
men; but we kept aloof from them, because we were not citizens of
France. But when we see the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as
Englishmen, and, feeling, we must provide as Englishmen. Your affairs,
in spite of us, are made a part of our interest,--so far at least as to
keep at a distance your panacea or your plague. If it be a panacea, we
do not want it: we know the consequences of unnecessary physic. If it be
a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe
quarantine ought to be established against it.

I hear on all hands, that a cabal, calling itself philosophic, receives
the glory of many of the late proceedings, and that their opinions and
systems are the true actuating spirit of the whole of them. I have heard
of no party in England, literary or political, at any time, known by
such a description. It is not with you composed of those men, is it?
whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style, commonly call Atheists
and Infidels? If it be, I admit that we, too, have had writers of that
description, who made some noise in their day. At present they repose in
lasting oblivion. Who, born within the last forty years, has read one
word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that
whole race who called themselves Freethinkers? Who now reads
Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Ask the booksellers of London
what is become of all these lights of the world. In as few years their
few successors will go to the family vault of "all the Capulets." But
whatever they were, or are, with us they were and are wholly unconnected
individuals. With us they kept the common nature of their kind, and were
not gregarious. They never acted in corps, nor were known as a faction
in the state, nor presumed to influence in that name or character, or
for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns.
Whether they ought so to exist, and so be permitted to act, is another
question. As such cabals have not existed in England, so neither has the
spirit of them had any influence in establishing the original frame of
our Constitution, or in any one of the several reparations and
improvements it has undergone. The whole has been done under the
auspices, and is confirmed by the sanctions, of religion and piety. The
whole has emanated from the simplicity of our national character, and
from