Passion has, in its first violence,
controlled interest, as the eddy for awhile runs against the stream.
To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near
to laudable, that they have been often praised, and are always pardoned.
To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love
could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made
without a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either
in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have,
with equal blindness, hated their country.
These antipatriotick prejudices are the abortions of folly impregnated
by faction, which, being produced against the standing order of nature,
have not strength sufficient for long life. They are born only to scream
and perish, and leave those to contempt or detestation, whose kindness
was employed to nurse them into mischief.
To perplex the opinion of the publick many artifices have been used,
which, as usually happens, when falsehood is to be maintained by fraud,
lose their force by counteracting one another.
The nation is, sometimes, to be mollified by a tender tale of men, who
fled from tyranny to rocks and deserts, and is persuaded to lose all
claims of justice, and all sense of dignity, in compassion for a
harmless people, who, having worked hard for bread in a wild country,
and obtained, by the slow progression of manual industry, the
accommodations of life, are now invaded by unprecedented oppression, and
plundered of their properties by the harpies of taxation.
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