which appoint the manner in which the
several component parts of the Government, legislative and executive,
shall be elected, and the period of their duration, and the powers they
shall have: also, the manner by which future additions, alterations,
or amendments, shall be made to the constitution. Consequently, every
improvement that can be made in the science of government, follows in
that country as a matter of order. It is only in Governments founded on
assumption and false principles, that reasoning upon, and investigating
systems and principles of Government, and shewing their several
excellencies and defects, are termed libellous and seditious. These
terms were made part of the charge brought against Locke, Hampden, and
Sydney, and will continue to be brought against all good men, so long as
bad government shall continue.

The Government of this country has been ostentatiously giving challenges
for more than an hundred years past, upon what it called its own
excellence and perfection. Scarcely a King's Speech, or a Parliamentary
Speech, has been uttered, in which this glove has not been thrown, till
the world has been insulted with their challenges. But it now appears
that all this was vapour and vain boasting, or that it was intended to
conceal abuses and defects, and hush the people into taxes. I have taken
the challenge up, and in behalf of the public have shewn, in a fair,
open, and candid manner, both the radical and practical defects of the
system; when, lo! those champions of the Civil List have fled away,
and sent the Attorney-General to deny the challenge, by turning the
acceptance of it into an attack, and defending their Places and Pensions
by a prosecution.

I will here drop this part of the subject, and state a few particulars
respecting the prosecution now pending, by which the Addressers will
see that they have been used as tools to the prosecuting party and their
dependents. The case is as follows:

The original edition of the First and Second Parts of the Rights of
Man, having been expensively printed, (in the modern stile of printing
pamphlets, that they might be bound up with Mr. Burke's Reflections on
the French Revolution,) the high price(1) precluded the generality
of people from purchasing; and many applications were made to me from
various parts of the country to print the work in a cheaper manner. The
people of Sheffield requested leave to print two thousand copies for
themselves, with