s;--it would reduce us to poverty and
slavery.

_Enter HUMPHRY, listening._

HUMPHRY. What's that about liberty, and property, and slavery, and popery,
and the devil? I hope the pope and the devil an't come to town for to play
the devil, and make nigers of us!

TRUEMAN. You will have it your own way.

LOVEYET. To be sure I will--in short, sir, the old Constitution is good
enough for me.

HUMPHRY. I wonder what Constitution magnifies.

TRUEMAN. The old Constitution!--ha, ha, ha, ha. Superlatively ludicrous and
facetious, upon my erudition; and highly productive of risibility--ha, ha,
ha. The old Constitution! A very shadow of a government--a perfect _caput
mortuum_;--why, one of my schoolboys would make a better: 'tis grown as
superannuated, embecilitated, valetudinarianated, invalidated, enervated
and dislocated as an old man of sixty odd.

LOVEYET. Ah, that's me--that's me--sixty odd, eigh--[_Aside._] I--I--ugh,
ugh, I know what you want:--a consolidation and annihilation of the States.

TRUEMAN. A consolidation and annihilation!--You certainly have bid defiance
to the first rudiments of grammar, and sworn war against the whole body of
lexicographers. Mercy on me! If words are to be thus abus'd and perverted,
there is an end of the four grand divisions of grammar at once: If
consolidation and annihilation are to be us'd synonymously, there is a
total annihilation of all the moods, tenses, genders, persons, nouns,
pronouns, verbs, adverbs, substantives, conjunctions, interjections,
prepositions, participles,--

[_Coughs._

HUMPHRY. Oh dear, oh dear,--what a wise man a Schoolmaster is!

TRUEMAN. How can the States be consolidated and annihilated too? If they
are consolidated or compounded into one national mass, surely the
individual States cannot be annihilated, for, if they were annihilated,
where would be the States to compose a consolidation?--Did you ever study
Logic, sir?

LOVEYET. No, but I've studied common sense tho', and that tells me I am
right, and consequently you are wrong; there, that's as good logic as
yours.

TRUEMAN. You mean Paine's _Common Sense_, I suppose--yes, yes, there you
manifest something like common sense, Mr. Loveyet.

LOVEYET. 'Tis no such thing, sir; it lately took three speakers, and much
better ones than Paine, no less than three whole days, to prove that
consolidation and annihilation are one and the same thing