The Virginia Gazette

NEW YORK, December 14, 1774.

MR. PINKNEY,

BY inserting the following Queries in your useful paper you will oblige
your constant customer,
MERCATOR AMERICANUS.

WHETHER the author of some late extraordinary queries in
Messieurs Purdie and Dixon's last paper, who styles himself an
ASSOCIATOR, may not be sometimes found in a certain grand seminary?

Whether his assuming the signature of an associator, when it is no-
torious to the world he is not, does not imply a duplicity of conduct,
great meanness, and pusillanimity?

Whether a man's principles, with respect to religious tenets, honour,
and sincerity, may not be impeached, when his assertions are so frequently
founded on the caprice of a fruitful imagination, and not matters of
fact?

With what justice or propriety can any person, in a public coffeehouse,
and other places, highly condemn the proceedings of the committees of
York and Gloucester, and even set them at defiance, when under the
borrowed name of associator, in Messieurs Purdie and Dixon's last paper,
he expressly avows and applauds those very measures he before opposed
with great wrath in public places?

Whether this lukewarm patriot does not daily infringe and act in vio-
lation of the association, by using that pernicious herb tea, which go-
vernment intended to force upon the Americans to their destruction?

Whether this gentleman must not be possessed of great effrontery,
when he undertakes to arraign the conduct of a merchant in London,
who he says has knowingly violated the association of this country, with
respect to the importation of tea? And whether this proof will not be
very difficult for him to make?

Whether this reverend prelate will not be much mortified when he
finds that his weapons, malevolence, envy, and revenge (besides his want
of christianity) are found insufficient to give the smallest wound to those
characters which he would wish to injure?

The above reflections, Mr. Pinkney, lead me to consider how much
more eligible would this man's lot be if he could not write at all, since,
by indulging a cacoethes scribendi, he will, in a short time, lose those few
friends he has at present.