to impose upon their reason, to surprise their justice, or to ruffle their temper.  I stood on the hustings (except when I gave my thanks to those who favored me with their votes) less like a candidate than an unconcerned spectator of a public proceeding.  But here the face of things is altered.  Here is an attempt for a general massacre of suffrages,—­an attempt, by a promiscuous carnage of friends and foes, to exterminate above two thousand votes, including seven hundred polled for the gentleman himself who now complains, and who would destroy the friends whom he has obtained, only because he cannot obtain as many of them as he wishes.

How he will be permitted, in another place, to stultify and disable himself, and to plead against his own acts, is another question.  The law will decide it.  I shall only speak of it as it concerns the propriety of public conduct in this city.  I do not pretend to lay down rules of decorum for other gentlemen.  They are best judges of the mode of proceeding that will recommend them to the favor of their fellow-citizens.  But I confess I should look rather awkward, if I had been the very first to produce the new copies of freedom,—­if I had persisted in producing them to the last,—­if I had ransacked, with the most unremitting industry and the most penetrating research, the remotest corners of the kingdom to discover them,—­if I were then, all at once, to turn short, and declare that I had been sporting all this while with the right of election, and that I had been drawing out a poll, upon no sort of rational grounds, which disturbed the peace of my fellow-citizens for a month together;—­I really, for my part, should appear awkward under such circumstances.

It would be still more awkward in me, if I were gravely to look the sheriffs in the face, and to tell them they were not to determine my cause on my own principles, nor to make the return upon those votes upon which I had rested my election.  Such would be my appearance to the court and magistrates.

But how should I appear to the voters themselves?  If I had gone round to the citizens entitled to freedom, and squeezed them by the hand,—­“Sir, I humbly beg your vote,—­I shall be eternally thankful,—­may I hope for the honor of your support?—­Well!—­come,—­we shall see you at the Council-House.”—­If I were then to deliver them to my managers, pack them into tallies, vote them off in court, and when I heard from the bar,—­“Such a one only! and such a one forever!—­he’s my man!”—­“Thank you, good Sir,—­Hah! my worthy friend! thank you kindly,—­that’s an honest fellow,—­how is your good family?”—­Whilst these words were hardly out of my mouth, if I should have wheeled round at once, and told them,—­“Get you gone, you pack of worthless fellows! you have no votes,—­you are usurpers! you are intruders on the rights of real freemen!  I will have nothing to do with you! you ought never to have been produced at this election, and the sheriffs ought not to have admitted you to poll!”—­