fallacious hope, the impostors deluded sometimes one description of men,
and sometimes another, so that no means of resistance were provided
against them, when they came to execute in cruelty what they had planned
in fraud.

There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed
on. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without
which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would
be by the perfidy of others. But when men whom we _know_ to be wicked
impose upon us, we are something worse than dupes. When we know them,
their fair pretences become new motives for distrust. There is one case,
indeed, in which it would be madness not to give the fullest credit to
the most deceitful of men,--that is, when they make declarations of
hostility against us.

I find that some persons entertain other hopes, which I confess appear
more specious than those by which at first so many were deluded and
disarmed. They flatter themselves that the extreme misery brought upon
the people by their folly will at last open the eyes of the multitude,
if not of their leaders. Much the contrary, I fear. As to the leaders in
this system of imposture,--you know that cheats and deceivers never can
repent. The fraudulent have no resource but in fraud. They have no other
goods in their magazine. They have no virtue or wisdom in their minds,
to which, in a disappointment concerning the profitable effects of fraud
and cunning, they can retreat. The wearing out of an old serves only to
put them upon the invention of a new delusion. Unluckily, too, the
credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves. They
never give people possession; but they always keep them in hope. Your
state doctors do not so much as pretend that any good whatsoever has
hitherto been derived from their operations, or that the public has