turn upon the beauty of liberty and
virtue, and the deformity, turpitude and malignity of slavery and
vice.--Let the public disputations become researches into the grounds
and nature and ends of government, and the means of preserving the good
and demolishing the evil.--Let the dialogues and all the exercises
become the instruments of impressing on the tender mind, and of
spreading and distributing, far and wide, the ideas of right and the
sensations of freedom.

In a word, let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a flowing.
The encroachments upon liberty, in the reigns of the first James and the
first Charles, by turning the general attention of learned men to
government, are said to have produced the greatest number of consummate
statesmen, which has ever been seen in any age, or nation. The Brooke's,
Hamden's, Falkland's, Vane's, Milton's, Nedham's, Harrington's,
Neville's, Sydney's, Locke's, are all said to have owed their eminence
in political knowledge, to the tyrannies of those reigns. The prospect,
now before us, in America, ought, in the same manner, to engage the
attention of every man of learning to matters of power and of right,
that we may be neither led nor driven blindfolded to irretrievable
destruction.----_Nothing less than this seems to have been meditated for
us, by somebody or other in Great Britain._ There seems to be a direct
and formal design on foot, to enslave all America.--This however must
be done by degrees.----The first step that is intended seems to be an
entire subversion of the whole system of our Fathers, by the
introduction of the canon and feudal law, into America.----The canon and
feudal systems though greatly mutilated in England, are not yet
destroyed. Like the temples and palaces, in which the great contrivers
of them were once worshiped and inhabited, they exist in ruins; and much
of the domineering spirit of them still remains.--The designs and
labours of a certain society, to introduce the former of them into
America, have been well exposed to the public by a writer of great
abilities; and the further attempts to the same purpose that may be made
by that society, or by the ministry or parliament, I leave to the
conjectures of the thoughtful.--But it seems very manifest from the
Stamp Act itself, that a design is formed to strip us in a great measure
of the means of knowledge, by loading the Press, the Colleges, and even
an Almanack and a News-Paper, with restraints and du