common plans into execution, with all the power and authority of the state.  As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty to contend for these situations.  Without a proscription of others, they are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things; and by no means, for private considerations, to accept any offers of power in which the whole body is not included; nor to suffer themselves to be led, or to be controlled, or to be overbalanced, in office or in council, by those who contradict the very fundamental principles on which their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair connection must stand.  Such a generous contention for power, on such manly and honorable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean and interested struggle for place and emolument.  The very style of such persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless impostors, who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human practice, and have afterwards incensed them by practices below the level of vulgar rectitude.

It is an advantage to all narrow wisdom and narrow morals, that their maxims have a plausible air:  and, on a cursory view, appear equal to first principles.  They are light and portable.  They are as current as copper coin; and about as valuable.  They serve equally the first capacities and the lowest; and they are, at least, as useful to the worst men as to the best.  Of this stamp is the cant of Not men, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.  When I see a man acting this desultory and disconnected part, with as much detriment to his own fortune as prejudice to the cause of any party, I am not persuaded that he is right; but I am ready to believe he is in earnest.  I respect virtue in all its situations; even when it is found in the unsuitable company of weakness.  I lament to see qualities, rare and valuable, squandered away without any public utility.  But when a gentleman with great visible emoluments abandons the party in which he has long acted, and tells you, it is because he proceeds upon his own judgment; that he acts on the merits of the several measures as they arise; and that he is obliged to follow his own conscience, and not that of others; he gives reasons which it is impossible to controvert, and discovers a character which it is impossible to mistake.  What shall we think of him who never differed from a certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards?  Would not such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather fortunate?  Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the dice, that a man’s connections should degenerate into faction, precisely at the critical moment when they lose their power, or he accepts a place?  When people desert their connections, the desertion is a manifest fact, upon which a direct simple issue lies, triable by plain men.  Whether a measure