and the mass
exterminated. But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it
hypocritically pretended, is to make it a trap to catch his liberty.

So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme
fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices,
by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times. Trusting wholly in
their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to
strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext
of the general good of the community. They say, that, if the people,
under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of
constitutional freedom, it will be impossible for them to hold their
property. They tell us that they act only on the defensive. They inform
the public of Europe that their estates are made up of forfeitures and
confiscations from the natives; that, if the body of people obtain
votes, any number of votes, however small, it will be a step to the
choice of members of their own religion; that the House of Commons, in
spite of the influence of nineteen parts in twenty of the landed
interest now in their hands, will be composed in the whole, or in far
the major part, of Papists; that this Popish House of Commons will
instantly pass a law to confiscate all their estates, which it will not
be in their power to save even by entering into that Popish party
themselves, because there are prior claimants to be satisfied; that, as
to the House of Lords, though neither Papists nor Protestants have a
share in electing them, the body of the peerage will be so obliging and
disinterested as to fall in with this exterminatory scheme, which is to
forfeit all their estates, the largest part of the kingdom; and, to
crown all, that his Majesty will give his cheerful assent to this
causeless act of attainder of his innocent and faithful Protestant
subjects; that they will be or are to be left, without house or land, to
the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are
already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation with which
they are threatened; that, therefore, they cannot so much as listen to
any arguments drawn from equity or from national or constitutional
policy: the sword is at their throats; beggary and famine at their door.
See what it is to have a good look-out, and to see danger at the end of
a sufficiently long perspective!

This is, indeed, to speak plain, t