The New Hampshire Gazette And General Advertiser

For the GAZETTE.

Mr. PRINTER,

By going the following observations a place in your useful paper, you will oblige at least one of your customers.

In forming political principles, would uniformly maintain the exercise of the side of liberty and expediency of leaning to the people, and of withstanding by all legal and rational means the encroachments of power.

All men who possess power, well established and confirmed, are naturally inclined to engross it. Let a spirit then be encouraged among the people at large, which may lead them to a jealous vigilance over the possessors of power, and animate them to a manly resistance on the slightest infringement of liberty. But, at the same time, we must not suffer the artful pursuers of their own interest to delude us by a name enchanting in the sound: we are bound to consider, in our dispassionate moments, the nature of liberty: to see and acknowledge the necessity of subordination, and the happiness of being governed by the equitable operation of impartial laws: to consider the preservation of good order and public tranquility as greatly conducive to the perpetuation of liberty, when it is once established on a solid basis: to distinguish between a real love of liberty, and a mere impatience of control, which is found to prevail in the bosom of envious and malignant men: to discern the difference between real patriotism and selfish opposition to present authority, in whomsoever invested, arising from a hope of partaking it on their deprivation: to remember that experience has abundantly confirmed the remark, that the loudest advocates for liberty, while out of power, are often the most arbitrary and tyrannical, both in the exercise of power, when they have obtained it, and in their private lives and natural dispositions: to beware of the needy adventurer in politics, who has nothing to lose, and has no prospect of gain but in demolishing the fabric raised by others, and enriching himself in the general plunder. Such cautions can never be too frequently repeated to the middle ranks, who have been miserably deluded by the wicked pretensions of pseudo-patriotism. I would evince the propriety of appointing men of private virtue and good character, to the great, honorable and efficient offices in the various departments of the State. It is difficult to conceive but that the accumulation of public honor, and emoluments on professed infidels, on notorious gamesters, and on infamous debauchees, is at once destructive of morality, religion, and national prosperity. Such appointments counteract, in the minds of the majority of a people, all the precepts of religion and morality. It is certainly right to disbelieve and to reprobate all pretensions to public virtue, wherever private virtue is notoriously deficient. Where private virtue is wanting there can be no soundness of principle, and without soundness of principle, no real virtue of any kind can subsist.

Patriotism in a bad man, is but disguised wickedness, of a most malignant nature, and usually proceeding from a deceitful, a proud, a jealous, a cruel, and a selfish disposition. The boasted abilities of profligate and corrupt characters are often but the desperate efforts of a distress, which has overcome all diffidence and restraint, and leads men to fight their way to promotion by noise, effrontery and overbearing presumption. We all indeed love power, and it is a useful impulse which urges us to aspire at eminence; but though we may reasonably wish for a share of power, let us learn the virtue, not to obstruct its salutary operation in the hands of others, merely because it is not in our own. The truest patriotism may often be evinced, by subduing the lust of power, by submissive silence, and by cheerful acquiescence, in a contented retirement, and in a humble exercise of the private and social virtues. The lust of power, like all other lust, is often most violent in diabolical dispositions, and the turbulent spirit which it produces, is the bane of society.

But amidst our cautions, we shall do well constantly to remember that liberty with all its attendant evils of faction and sedition, is, upon the whole, infinitely more conducive to the happiness and to the improvement of human nature, than the tranquil repose of established despotism. An arbitrary government diffuses a benumbing, freezing, sophorific influence over the human faculties, especially in the middle and lowest ranks of life: and there is no danger or inconvenience which ought not to be cheerfully incurred to destroy it from the face of the earth.

The tree of liberty, so well planted and watered in America, will, I hope, flourish more and more: and impart many a slip and sucker to grow in climates which now appear most ungenial to its cultivation.