If I point to it before your eyes, must I be at the trouble of repeating it every morning?  Are our people’s “hearts waxed gross”?  Are “their ears dull of hearing,” and have “they closed their eyes”?  I fear there are some few vipers among us, who, for ten or twenty pounds gain, would sell their souls and their country, though at last it would end in their own ruin as well as ours.  Be not like “the deaf adder, who refuses to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely.”

Though my letter be directed to you, Mr. Harding, yet I intend it for all my countrymen.  I have no interest in this affair but what is common to the public.  I can live better than many others, I have some gold and silver by me, and a shop well furnished, and shall be able to make a shift when many of my betters are starving.  But I am grieved to see the coldness and indifference of many people, with whom I discourse.  Some are afraid of a proclamation, others shrug up their shoulders, and cry, “What would you have us do?” Some give out, there is no danger at all.  Others are comforted that it will be a common calamity and they shall fare no worse than their neighbours.  Will a man, who hears midnight robbers at his door, get out of bed, and raise his family for a common defence, and shall a whole kingdom lie in a lethargy, while Mr. Wood comes at the head of his confederates to rob them of all they have, to ruin us and our posterity for ever?  If an highwayman meets you on the road, you give him your money to save your life, but, God be thanked, Mr. Wood cannot touch a hair of your heads.  You have all the laws of God and man on your side.  When he or his accomplices offer you his dross it is but saying no, and you are safe.  If a madman should come to my shop with an handful of dirt raked out of the kennel, and offer it in payment for ten yards of stuff, I would pity or laugh at him, or, if his behaviour deserved it, kick him out of my doors.  And if Mr. Wood comes to demand any gold and silver, or commodities for which I have paid my gold and silver, in exchange for his trash, can he deserve or expect better treatment?

When the evil day is come (if it must come) let us mark and observe those who presume to offer these halfpence in payment.  Let their names, and trades, and places of abode be made public, that every one may be aware of them, as betrayers of their country, and confederates with Mr. Wood.  Let them be watched at markets and fairs, and let the first honest discoverer give the word about, that Wood’s halfpence have been offered, and caution the poor innocent people not to receive them.

Perhaps I have been too tedious; but there would never be an end, if I attempted to say all that this melancholy subject will bear.  I will conclude with humbly offering one proposal, which, if it were put in practice, would blow up this destructive project at once.  Let some skilful judicious pen draw up an advertisement to the following purpose.