I have told you candidly my sentiments.  I think they are not likely to alter yours.  I do not know that they ought.  You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your country.  But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take.  In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, “through great varieties of untried being,” and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood.

I have little to recommend my opinions but long observation and much impartiality.  They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.  They come from one almost the whole of whose public exertion has been a struggle for the liberty of others,—­from one in whose breast no anger durable or vehement has ever been kindled but by what he considered as tyranny, and who snatches from his share in the endeavors which are used by good men to discredit opulent oppression the hours he has employed on your affairs, and who in so doing persuades himself he has not departed from his usual office.  They come from one who desires honors, distinctions, and emoluments but little, and who expects them not at all,—­who has no contempt for fame, and no fear of obloquy,—­who shuns contention, though he will hazard an opinion; from one who wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end,—­and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise.

FOOTNOTES: 

[77] Ps. cxlix.

[78] Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr. Richard Price, 3d edition, p. 17 and 18.

[79] “Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public authority ought, if they can find no worship out of the Church which they approve, to set up a separate worship for themselves; and by doing this, and giving an example of a rational and manly worship, men of weight from their rank and literature may do the greatest service to society and the world.”—­P. 18, Dr. Price’s Sermon.

[80] P. 34, Discourse on the Love of our Country, by Dr. Price.

[81] 1st Mary, sess. 3, ch. 1.

[82] “That King James the Second, having endeavored to subvert the Constitution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, hath abdicated the government, and the throne is thereby vacant.”