If these evil dispositions should spread much farther they must end in
our destruction; for nothing can save a people destitute of public and
private faith. However, the author, for the present state of things, has
extended the charge by much too widely; as men are but too apt to take
the measure of all mankind from their own particular acquaintance.
Barren as this age may be in the growth of honour and virtue, the
country does not want, at this moment, as strong, and those not a few,
examples as were ever known, of an unshaken adherence to principle, and
attachment to connexion, against every allurement of interest. Those
examples are not furnished by the great alone; nor by those, whose
activity in public affairs may render it suspected that they make such a
character one of the rounds in their ladder of ambition; but by men more
quiet, and more in the shade, on whom an unmixed sense of honour alone
could operate.