Your lordship has had a great number of masters. Your
excellent father, who himself had some dabbling in politics, spared no
expence upon your education, though I believe he had by no means so high
an opinion of your genius and abilities as I entertained. Your lordship
therefore is to be presumed competently versed in the rudiments of
ethics. You have read Grotius, Puffendorf, and Cumberland. For my part I
never opened a volume of any one of them. I am self-taught. My science
originates entirely in my unbounded penetration, and a sort of divine
and supernatural afflatus. With all this your lordship knows I am a
modest man. I have never presumed to entrench upon the province of
others. Let the professors of ethics talk their nonsense. I will not
interrupt them. I will not endeavour to set your lordship against them.
It is necessary for me to take politics upon an unlimited scale, and to
suppose that a statesman has no character to preserve but that of
speciousness and plausibility. But it is your lordship's business to
enquire whether this be really the case.
I need not tell you, that I shall not, like the political writers with
which you are acquainted, talk in the air. My instructions will be of a
practical nature, and my rules adapted to the present condition of the
English government.
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