ive hundred
pounds a year.

This is a government that has nothing to fear. It needs no proclamations
to deter people from writing and reading. It needs no political
superstition to support it; it was by encouraging discussion and
rendering the press free upon all subjects of government, that the
principles of government became understood in America, and the people
are now enjoying the present blessings under it. You hear of no riots,
tumults, and disorders in that country; because there exists no cause
to produce them. Those things are never the effect of Freedom, but of
restraint, oppression, and excessive taxation.

In America, there is not that class of poor and wretched people that
are so numerously dispersed all over England, who are to be told by a
proclamation, that they are happy; and this is in a great measure to
be accounted for, not by the difference of proclamations, but by the
difference of governments and the difference of taxes between that
country and this. What the labouring people of that country earn, they
apply to their own use, and to the education of their children, and
do not pay it away in taxes as fast as they earn it, to support Court
extravagance, and a long enormous list of place-men and pensioners;
and besides this, they have learned the manly doctrine of reverencing
themselves, and consequently of respecting each other; and they laugh
at those imaginary beings called Kings and Lords, and all the fraudulent
trumpery of Court.

When place-men and pensioners, or those who expect to be such, are
lavish in praise of a government, it is not a sign of its being a good
one. The pension list alone in England (see sir John Sinclair's History
of the Revenue, p. 6, of the Appendix) is one hundred and seven thousand
four hundred and four pounds, _which is more than the expences of the
whole Government of America amount to_. And I am now more convinced than
before, that the offer that was made to me of a thousand pounds for the
copy-right of the second part of the Rights of Man, together with the
remaining copyright of the first part, was to have effected, by a quick
suppression, what is now attempted to be done by a prosecution. The
connection which the person, who made the offer, has with the King's
printing-office, may furnish part of the means of inquiring into this
affair, when the ministry shall please to bring their prosecution to
issue.(1) But to return to my subject.--

I have said in the s