.

To be prejudiced is always to be weak; yet there are prejudices so near
to laudable, that they have been often praised, and are always pardoned.
To love their country has been considered as virtue in men, whose love
could not be otherwise than blind, because their preference was made
without a comparison; but it has never been my fortune to find, either
in ancient or modern writers, any honourable mention of those, who have,
with equal blindness, hated their country.

These antipatriotick prejudices are the abortions of folly impregnated
by faction, which, being produced against the standing order of nature,
have not strength sufficient for long life. They are born only to scream
and perish, and leave those to contempt or detestation, whose kindness
was employed to nurse them into mischief.

To perplex the opinion of the publick many artifices have been used,
which, as usually happens, when falsehood is to be maintained by fraud,
lose their force by counteracting one another.

The nation is, sometimes, to be mollified by a tender tale of men, who
fled from tyranny to rocks and deserts, and is persuaded to lose all
claims of justice, and all sense of dignity, in compassion for a
harmless people, who, having worked hard for bread in a wild country,
and obtained, by the slow progression of manual industry, the
accommodations of life, are now invaded by unprecedented oppression, and
plundered of their properties by the harpies of taxation.

We are told how their industry is obstructed by unnatural restraints,
and their trade confined by rigorous prohibitions; how they are
forbidden to enjoy the products of their own soil, to manufacture the
materials which nature spreads before them, or to carry their own goods
to the nearest market; and surely the generosity of English virtue will
never heap new weight upon those that are already overladen; will never
delight in that dominion, which cannot be exercised, but by cruelty and
outrage.

But, while we are melting in silent sorrow, and, in the transports of
delirious pity, dropping both the sword and balance from our hands,
another friend of the Americans thinks it better to awaken another
passion, and tries to alarm our interest, or excite our veneration, by
accounts of their greatness and their opulence, of the fertility of
their land, and the splendour of their towns. We then begin to consider
the question with more evenness of mind, are ready to conclude that
those