Formerly your affairs were your own concern only.  We felt for them as men; but we kept aloof from them, because we were not citizens of France.  But when we see the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and, feeling, we must provide as Englishmen.  Your affairs, in spite of us, are made a part of our interest,—­so far at least as to keep at a distance your panacea or your plague.  If it be a panacea, we do not want it:  we know the consequences of unnecessary physic.  If it be a plague, it is such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it.

I hear on all hands, that a cabal, calling itself philosophic, receives the glory of many of the late proceedings, and that their opinions and systems are the true actuating spirit of the whole of them.  I have heard of no party in England, literary or political, at any time, known by such a description.  It is not with you composed of those men, is it? whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style, commonly call Atheists and Infidels?  If it be, I admit that we, too, have had writers of that description, who made some noise in their day.  At present they repose in lasting oblivion.  Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?  Who now reads Bolingbroke?  Who ever read him through?  Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these lights of the world.  In as few years their few successors will go to the family vault of “all the Capulets.”  But whatever they were, or are, with us they were and are wholly unconnected individuals.  With us they kept the common nature of their kind, and were not gregarious.  They never acted in corps, nor were known as a faction in the state, nor presumed to influence in that name or character, or for the purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns.  Whether they ought so to exist, and so be permitted to act, is another question.  As such cabals have not existed in England, so neither has the spirit of them had any influence in establishing the original frame of our Constitution, or in any one of the several reparations and improvements it has undergone.  The whole has been done under the auspices, and is confirmed by the sanctions, of religion and piety.  The whole has emanated from the simplicity of our national character, and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding, which for a long time characterized those men who have successively obtained authority among us.  This disposition still remains,—­at least in the great body of the people.