But the very motive that inclines the depraved to such a
mode of reasoning, must, upon the very same account, deter the man of
virtue from adopting it. Virtue is originally ever simple and
unsuspecting. Conscious to its own rectitude, and the integrity of its
professions, it naturally expects the same species of conduct from
others. By every disappointment of this kind, it is mortified and
humbled. Long, very long must it have been baffled, and countless must
have been its mortifications, ere it can be induced to adopt a principle
of general mistrust. And that such a principle should have so large a
spread among persons, whose honesty, candour forbids us to suspect, is
surely, of all the paradoxe upon the face of the earth, incomparably the
greatest.--The man of virtue then will be willing, before he gives up
all our political connexions without distinction, to go along with me to
the review of the only one that yet remains to be examined, that of the
late marquis of Rockingham.
Too much perhaps cannot be said in their praise. They have nearly
engrossed the confidence of every friend of liberty. They are the only
men, whose principles were never darkened with the cloud of suspicion.
What, let me ask, has been their uniform conduct during the whole course
of the reign? They have been ever steady in their opposition, to
whatever bore an ill aspect to the cause of freedom, and to the whole
train of those political measures, that have terminated in calamity and
ruin.
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