This Fable is levelled at those who love to “fish in troubled waters,”
and whose execrable principles are such, that they care not what
mischief or what confusion they occasion in the world, provided they
can obtain their ends, or even gratify some little selfish appetite.
Little villains would set fire to a town, provided they could rake
something of value to themselves out of its ashes; or kindle the flames
of discord among friends and neighbours, purely to gratify their own
malicious temper; and among the great ones there are those who, to
succeed in their ambitious designs, will make no scruple of involving
their country in divisions and animosities at home, and sometimes in
war and bloodshed abroad: provided they do but maintain themselves in
power, they care not what havoc and desolation they bring upon the rest
of mankind. Their only reason is, that it must be so, because they
cannot live as they wish without it. But brutish unsocial sentiments
like these, are such as a mere state of nature would scarcely suggest;
and it is perverting the very end, and overturning the first principles
of society, when, instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind,
in return for the benefits we receive from them, we thrive by their
misfortunes, or subsist by their ruin. Those, therefore, who have
the happiness of mankind at heart, (for happiness and morality are
inseparably connected) should enter their protest against such wicked
selfish notions, and oppose them with all their might; at the same time
shunning the society of their possessors as a plague, and consigning
their characters to the detestation of posterity.
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