Virginia Argus

CHARACTER OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT.

Extract from the address of the householders of the city and liberties of Westminster to the Prince Regent

The nature of the nefarious system of government which hath grown with the growth and strengthened with the strength of the borough faction, is ascertained to us by long and calamitous experience. Its root is tyranny: its fruit is ruin. It scourged America into resistance. Ireland it tortured into rebellion. It disinherited your royal highness of many and flourishing states; and the numerous seamen of those states it alienated from the English navy.

It was this system of government which peopled our prisons with innocent persons, for the malignant prosecution of whom ministers took shelter under a bill of indemnity passed by themselves and their abettors.

It is this system of government which hath pauperized more than a million of our English fellow subjects; and which daily augments their number

It is this system of government that covers our once free land with bastiles and barracks—that brands the millions of England as cowards, needing foreign soldiers for defenders: and bring back upon us the doctrines and the cruelties of the star chamber

This system of government, by a blind infatuation, confers on French and other foreign Roman Catholic officers, what it offensively refuses to a native Irish; filling the hearts of the Irish millions with indignation and resentment; combustible passions which so pent up, cannot without terror be contemplated.

This system of government hath, in the end, demonstrated the wickedness, and exposed the folly of those, who, to tear from the people all hope of a just reform, forced them into an unjust war: for, after hundreds of millions have been insanely squandered, after rivers of blood have been inhumanly shed, after the nation, soiled and disgraced; has been reduced to a forlorn hope—after all this has been brought on us by corrupt, short-sighted, and tyrannical men, for putting down and treading under foot parliamentary reform, it is at length seen, that in this reform, and in this reform alone, national salvation can be found.