direct us, reason.  Of all the troubles, do not decline, as many people do, that of thinking.  The herd of mankind can hardly be said to think; their notions are almost all adoptive; and, in general, I believe it is better that it should be so, as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated and unimproved as they are.  We have many of those useful prejudices in this country, which I should be very sorry to see removed.  The good Protestant conviction, that the Pope is both Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon, is a more effectual preservative in this country against popery, than all the solid and unanswerable arguments of Chillingworth.

The idle story of the pretender’s having been introduced in a warming pan into the queen’s bed, though as destitute of all probability as of all foundation, has been much more prejudicial to the cause of Jacobitism than all that Mr. Locke and others have written, to show the unreasonableness and absurdity of the doctrines of indefeasible hereditary right, and unlimited passive obedience.  And that silly, sanguine notion, which is firmly entertained here, that one Englishman can beat three Frenchmen, encourages, and has sometimes enabled, one Englishman in reality to beat two.

A Frenchman ventures, his life with alacrity ‘pour l’honneur du Roi’; were you to change the object, which he has been taught to have in view, and tell him that it was ‘pour le bien de la Patrie’, he would very probably run away.  Such gross local prejudices prevail with the herd of mankind, and do not impose upon cultivated, informed, and reflecting minds.  But then they are notions equally false, though not so glaringly absurd, which are entertained by people of superior and improved understandings, merely for want of the necessary pains to investigate, the proper attention to examine, and the penetration requisite to determine the truth.  Those are the prejudices which I would have you guard against by a manly exertion and attention of your reasoning faculty.  To mention one instance of a thousand that I could give you:  It is a general prejudice, and has been propagated for these sixteen hundred years, that arts and sciences cannot flourish under an absolute government; and that genius must necessarily be cramped where freedom is restrained.  This sounds plausible, but is false in fact.  Mechanic arts, as agriculture, etc., will indeed be discouraged where the profits and property are, from the nature of the government, insecure.  But why the despotism of a government should cramp the genius of a mathematician, an astronomer, a poet, or an orator, I confess I never could discover.  It may indeed deprive the poet or the orator of the liberty of treating of certain subjects in the manner they would wish, but it leaves them subjects enough to exert genius upon, if they have it.  Can an author with reason complain that he is cramped and shackled, if he is not at liberty