writings to religion, and virtue, and order, have not been punished,
nor their authors discountenanced; that the most audacious libels on
Royal Majesty have passed without notice; that the most treasonable
invectives against the laws, liberties, and constitution of the
country, have not met with the slightest animadversion; I must
consider this as a shocking and shameless pretence. Never did an
envenomed scurrility against everything sacred and civil, public and
private, rage through the kingdom with such a furious and unbridled
licence. All this while the peace of the nation must be shaken, to
ruin one libeller, and to tear from the populace a single favourite.

Nor is it that vice merely skulks in an obscure and contemptible
impunity. Does not the public behold with indignation, persons not
only generally scandalous in their lives, but the identical persons
who, by their society, their instruction, their example, their
encouragement, have drawn this man into the very faults which have
furnished the Cabal with a pretence for his persecution, loaded with
every kind of favour, honour, and distinction, which a Court can
bestow? Add but the crime of servility (the foedum crimem
servitutis) to every other crime, and the whole mass is immediately
transmuted into virtue, and becomes the just subject of reward and
honour. When therefore I reflect upon this method pursued by the
Cabal in distributing rewards and punishments, I must conclude that
Mr. Wilkes is the object of persecution, not on account of what he
has done in common with others who are the objects of reward, but
for that in which he differs from many of them: that he is pursued
for the spirited dispositions which are blended with his vices; for
his unconquerable firmness, for his resolute, indefatigable,
strenuous resistance against oppression.