In the title of your letter, it is said to be “occasioned by the late invectives on the King, her Majesty, and all the Royal Family:”  and the whole contents of the paper (stripped from your eloquence) goes on upon a supposition affectedly serious, that their Majesties, and the whole Royal Family, have been lately bitterly and publicly inveighed against in the most enormous and treasonable manner.  Now, being a man, as you well know, altogether out of business, I do sometimes lose an hour in reading a few of those controversial papers upon politics, which have succeeded for some years past to the polemical tracts between Whig and Tory:  and in this kind of reading (if it may deserve to be so called) although I have been often but little edified, or entertained, yet hath it given me occasion to make some observations.  First, I have observed, that however men may sincerely agree in all the branches of the Low Church principle, in a tenderness for dissenters of every kind, in a perfect abhorrence of Popery and the Pretender, and in the most firm adherence to the Protestant succession in the royal house of Hanover; yet plenty of matter may arise to kindle their animosities against each other from the various infirmities, follies, and vices inherent in mankind.

Secondly, I observed, that although the vulgar reproach which charges the quarrels between ministers, and their opposers, to be only a contention for power between those who are in, and those who would be in if they could; yet as long as this proceeds no further than a scuffle of ambition among a few persons, it is only a matter of course, whereby the public is little affected.  But when corruptions are plain, open, and undisguised, both in their causes and effects, to the hazard of a nation’s ruin, and so declared by all the principal persons and the bulk of the people, those only excepted who are gainers by those corruptions:  and when such ministers are forced to fly for shelter to the throne, with a complaint of disaffection to majesty against all who durst dislike their administration:  such a general disposition in the minds of men, cannot, I think, by any rules of reason, be called the “clamour of a few disaffected incendiaries,” gasping[217] after power.  It is the true voice of the people; which must and will at last be heard, or produce consequences that I dare not mention.

I have observed thirdly, that among all the offensive printed papers which have come to my hand, whether good or bad, the writers have taken particular pains to celebrate the virtues of our excellent King and Queen, even where these were, strictly speaking, no part of the subject:  nor can it be properly objected that such a proceeding was only a blind to cover their malice towards you and your assistants; because to affront the King, Queen, or the Royal Family, as it would be directly opposite to the principles that those kind of writers have always professed, so it would destroy the very end they have in pursuit.  And it is somewhat remarkable, that those very writers against you, and the regiment you command, are such as most distinguish themselves upon all, or upon no occasions, by their panegyrics on their prince; and, as all of them do this without favour or hire, so some of them continue the same practice under the severest prosecution by you and your janizaries.