Gazette Of The United States

Extract from the considerations and resolutions entered into by the citizens of London, assembled at the Crown and Anchor Tavern.

"We foresee, from recent experiment in a neighboring country, that in the operation of bringing to pass such a transition, the lives and properties of all persons in this island would be exposed to the arbitrary disposal of self-opinionated philosophers, and a wild and needy mob, deluded and instigated by them; that with the introduction of equality in rank and fortune, an expectation would be raised in the lower orders, which must first be gratified with plunder, and afterwards would sink into a state of disappointment and abject poverty When all were equalized, there would no longer be a superfluity to pay the hire of servants, or purchase the productions of art or manufacture; no commerce, no credit; no resource for the active but in robbery, and in all those public disorders which make life miserable. Thus would the present generation be certainly ruined; that which is to follow, could not propose to itself a remedy, but in pursuing the same arts of peace which had been so capriciously abandoned: and the more they prospered in that pursuit, the more they would contribute to re-produce the inequality which had been before condemned and exploded. Where then are the blessings of this reform, and to what purpose is misery to be brought on the present generation?

It is with grief we see, that in a neighbouring country, the carrying into practice of this wild doctrine of Equality and the Rights of Man, has already produced these evils, and others ten thousand times greater: It is not yet publicly known, nor can it enter into the gentle heart of a Briton to conceive, the number of atrocious crimes against God and Man, that have been committed in support of these opinions. Murders and assassinations have been deliberately planned, and justified by some of these pretended philosophers, as the means to attain their ends of reform. With all their pretences and promises, they have proceeded to violate every right, civil and natural, that should have been observed towards their equals; the people, who have only changed their masters, groan under new tyrannies of which they never heard or dreamed; and are subjected to the chastisement of one desperate leader after another. The excess of these ruffian demagogues have no bounds; they have already usurped the wildest phrenzies of fanaticism, superstition and enthusiasm; plundering and murdering at home, and propagating their opinions by the sword in foreign countries; imposture, fallacy, falsehood, and bloodshed; their philosophy is the idle talk of school boys; and their actions are the savage ferocity of wild beasts."