in of
mankind."--This is an observation of Dr. _Tillotson_, with relation to
the interest of his fellow-men, in a future and immortal state: But it
is of equal truth and importance, if applied to the happiness of men in
society, on this side the grave.--In the earliest ages of the world,
_absolute Monarchy_ seems to have been the universal form of
government.--Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains,
exercised a cruel tyranny over the people who held a rank in the scale
of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and
elephants, that carried them and their engines to war.

By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle
ages, became more _intelligent_ in general, would not perhaps be
possible in these days to discover: But the fact is certain, and
wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the
people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened
and disappeared in proportion.--Man has certainly an exalted soul! and
the same principle in human nature; that aspiring noble principle,
founded in benevolence and cherished by knowledge; I mean the love of
power, which has been so often the cause of _slavery_, has, whenever
freedom has existed, been the cause of freedom. If it is this principle,
that has always prompted the princes and nobles of the earth, by every
species of fraud and violence, to shake off all the limitations of their
power; it is the same that has always stimulated the common people to
aspire at independency, and to endeavour at confining the power of the
great, within the limits of equity and reason.

The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the
great--They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form an
union and exert their strength--ignorant as they were of arts and
letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular
opposition. This, however, has been known, by the great, to be the
temper of mankind, and they have accordingly laboured, in all ages, to
wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the
knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former
or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly,
antecedent to all earthly government--_Rights_, that cannot be repealed
or restrained by human laws--_Rights_, derived from the great Legislator
of the universe.

Since the promulgation of christianit