to which you allude, as it so ill accords
with the spirit of equal liberty, from which the rest of the
system has flowed; whereas no material reformation of the many
abuses to which the latter are subject, it is to be feared, can be
made without violence and confusion.

I congratulate you, gentlemen, as you do me, on our arrival in a
country in which men who wish well to their fellow citizens, and
use their best endeavours to render them the most important
services, men who are an honour to human nature and to any
country, are in no danger of being treated like the worst felons,
as is now the case in Great Britain.

Happy should I think myself in joining with you in welcoming to
this country every friend of liberty, who is exposed to danger
from the tyranny of the British Government, and who, while they
continue under it, must expect to share in those calamities, which
its present infatuation must, sooner or later, bring upon it. But
let us all join in supplications to the Great Parent of the
Universe, that for the sake of the many excellent characters in
our native country its government may be reformed, and the
judgments impending over it prevented.

The hearty reception accorded Dr. Priestley met in due course with a
cruel attack upon him by William Cobbett, known under the pen-name of
Peter Porcupine, an Englishman, who after arrival in this country
enjoyed a rather prosperous life by formulating scurrilous
literature--attacks upon men of prominence, stars shining brightly in
the human firmament.

An old paper, the _Argus_, for the year 1796, said of this Peter
Porcupine:

When this political caterpillar was crawling about at St. John's,
Nova Scotia, in support of his Britannic Majesty's glorious cause,
against the United States, and holding the rank of serjeant major
in the 54th regiment, then quartered in that land, "flowing with
milk and honey," and GRINDSTONES, and commanded by Colonel Bruce;
it was customary for some of the officers to hire out the soldiers
to the country people, instead of keeping them to military duty,
and to pocket the money themselves. Peter found he could make a
_speck_ out of this, and therefore kept a watchful eye over the
sins of his superiors. When the regiment was recalled and had
returned to England--Peter,