effect. Therefore, every honourable 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