--The daring and ignorant often become
depredators of private property; while those who have more talents, and
less courage, endeavour to succeed by the artifices which conciliate
public favour. I am not certain whether the latter are not to be most
dreaded of the two, for those who make a trade of the confidence of the
people seldom fail to corrupt them--they find it more profitable to
flatter their passions than to enlighten their understandings; and a
demagogue of this kind, who obtains an office by exciting one popular
insurrection, will make no scruple of maintaining himself in it by
another. An inferrence may likewise be drawn of the great necessity of
cultivating such a degree of useful knowledge in the middle order of
society, as may not only prevent their being deceived by interested
adventurers themselves, but enable them to instruct the people in their
true interests, and rescue them from becoming the instruments, and
finally the victims, of fraud and imposture.--The insult and oppression
which the nobility frequently experience from those who have been
promoted by the revolution, will, I trust, be a useful lesson in future
to the great, who may be inclined to arrogate too much from adventitious
distinctions, to forget that the earth we tread upon may one day
overwhelm us, and that the meanest of mankind may do us an injury which
it is not in the power even of the most exalted to shield us from.
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