We ought not, on either side of
the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit
wares which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit
bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth, though wholly alien to
our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this
country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved
liberty.
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried,
nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They
look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their
rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a
grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of
servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, _such as it
stands_, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed
succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity
of all the other members of our Constitution.
I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of some
paltry artifices which the abettors of election as the only lawful title
to the crown are ready to employ, in order to render the support of the
just principles of our Constitution a task somewhat invidious. These
sophisters substitute a fictitious cause, and feigned personages, in
whose favor they suppose you engaged, whenever you defend the
inheritable nature of the crown.
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