ble connection will avow it as
their first purpose to pursue every just method to put the men who hold
their opinions into such a condition as may enable them to carry their
common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the
State. As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty
to contend for these situations. Without a proscription of others, they
are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things, and by
no means, for private considerations, to accept any offers of power in
which the whole body is not included, nor to suffer themselves to be led,
or to be controlled, or to be over-balanced, in office or in council, by
those who contradict, the very fundamental principles on which their
party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection must
stand. Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and
honourable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and
interested struggle for place and emolument. The very style of such
persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless impostors
who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human
practice, and have afterwards incensed them by practices below the level
of vulgar rectitude.

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals that their
maxims have a plausible air, and, on a cursory view, appear equal to
first principles. They are light and portable. They are as current as
copper coin, and about as valuable. They serve equally the first
capacities and the lowest, and they are, at least, as useful to the worst
men as the best. Of this stamp is the cant of _Not men_, _but measures_;
a sort of charm, by which many people got loose from every honourable
engagement. When I see a man acting this desultory and disconnected
part, with as much detriment to his own fortune as prejudice to the cause
of any party, I am not persuaded that he is right, but I am ready to
believe he is in earnest. I respect virtue in all its situations, even
when it is found in the unsuitable company of weakness. I lament to see
qualities, rare and valuable, squandered away without any public utility.
But when a gentleman with great visible emoluments abandons the party in
which he has long acted, and tells you it is because he proceeds upon his
own judgment that he acts on the merits of the several measures as they
arise, and that he is obliged to follow his own conscience, an