The drudges of sedition wish to change their ground; they hear him with sullen silence, feel conviction without repentance, and are confounded, but not abashed; they go forward to another door, and find a kinder reception from a man enraged against the government, because he has just been paying the tax upon his windows.

That a petition for a dissolution of the parliament will, at all times, have its favourers, may be easily imagined.  The people, indeed, do not expect that one house of commons will be much honester or much wiser than another; they do not suppose that the taxes will be lightened; or, though they have been so often taught to hope it, that soap and candles will be cheaper; they expect no redress of grievances, for of no grievances, but taxes, do they complain; they wish not the extension of liberty, for they do not feel any restraint; about the security of privilege or property they are totally careless, for they see no property invaded, nor know, till they are told, that any privilege has suffered violation.

Least of all do they expect, that any future parliament will lessen its own powers, or communicate to the people that authority which it has once obtained.

Yet a new parliament is sufficiently desirable.  The year of election is a year of jollity; and, what is still more delightful, a year of equality:  the glutton now eats the delicacies for which he longed when he could not purchase them, and the drunkard has the pleasure of wine, without the cost:  the drone lives awhile without work, and the shopkeeper, in the flow of money, raises his price:  the mechanick, that trembled at the presence of sir Joseph, now bids him come again for an answer:  and the poacher, whose gun has been seized, now finds an opportunity to reclaim it.  Even the honest man is not displeased to see himself important, and willingly resumes, in two years, that power which he had resigned for seven.  Few love their friends so well as not to desire superiority by unexpensive benefaction.

Yet, notwithstanding all these motives to compliance, the promoters of petitions have not been successful.  Few could be persuaded to lament evils which they did not suffer, or to solicit for redress which they do not want.  The petition has been, in some places, rejected; and, perhaps, in all but one, signed only by the meanest and grossest of the people.

Since this expedient, now invented or revived, to distress the government, and equally practicable, at all times, by all who shall be excluded from power and from profit, has produced so little effect, let us consider the opposition as no longer formidable.  The great engine has recoiled upon them.  They thought, that the terms, they sent, were terms of weight, which would have amazed all, and stumbled many; but the consternation is now over, and their foes stand upright, as before.

With great propriety and dignity the king has, in his speech, neglected or forgotten them.  He might easily know, that what was presented, as the sense of the people, is the sense only of the profligate and dissolute; and, that whatever parliament should be convened, the same petitioners would be ready, for the same reason, to request its dissolution.