Cosmopolitan, No. VI

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To the Inhabitants of the AMERICAN Colonies:

It has been asked, "What was become of Cosmopolitan?" What of his promise, that a further catalogue of vices, which blackens the escutcheons of an Hutchinson, and gives him a plenitude of infamy, should be the subject of some future number? The reasons of that engagement, and the motives for its present performance, are of a similar nature. Truth is his object, freedom his wishes, and seasonable, manly exertions the scope of all his lucubrations. I shall not attempt to trace the vestiges that mark the character of our hero from early to more advanced life: this would be both tedious and useless. As a child of ambition, and tainted with avarice, I might describe him a wretched compound of plausibility and hypocrisy, shrewdness and weakness, cordiality and deceit, extravagancy and rapacity/artifice and sophistry, in those very Departments in which he was placed by the mistake of his countrymen, and in which he dazzled his friends by a blaze of counterfeit virtues. But the event has proved what many suspected, that he was then cankered at heart. From a vain conceit, and an arrogant superciliousness, they suspected the dark, crafty, and designing inhabitant within, and presaged that great duplicity and treachery lurked in an uncommon complaisant, simpering phiz. His abilities, to do him justice, though not of the greatest size, were sufficiently ample. Had they been employed in the service of his country, the cause of virtue, and the support of liberty, he had been respected, and raised monuments to his memory. But a prostitution of the faculties of the

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In my third number, to which this is an appendix, I asserted that America had for several years been trembling under the rod of oppression; that her neck had been galled by the yoke, and her spirits greatly depressed; that the shackles have been forged, and even put upon our hands, though unriveted; that we have enjoyed little more than the formality, without the real essence of liberty; that under the habits of regularity, real anarchy, confusion, and concealed abominable tyranny, had made an amazing progress; that the condition of war, the consequence of an independency, that no situation can be more depressing to the spirits of freemen, than the slate we have been in. Instances were then adduced to evince the assertions. In obedience to the voice of the publick, the calls from the Congress, I now add to their number, and ask once more for the attention, patience, and candour of my abused, wretchedly abused, countrymen.

When riches and lawless domination are made the standard of good and evil, the object of pursuit, and the idol of the times, the Prince and his Court are seized with the infection. The strength of Government the force of the Treasury, and the arts of minions, are perverted to turn subjects into property, and to command their possessions for profit or for pleasure. Military force is employed to extort, ingenuity, policy, and fraud to decoy and seduce, or the hire of the venal, the wages of prostitution, to buy an accession to their interest. Hence is (says a great Court writer) the speedy change of Governours, which obliges those temporary tyrants to be more expeditious and rapacious, that they may accumulate sufficient wealth before they give place to their hungry successors. Made by their master with a separate interest, they have been strangers to the checks of the governed, the direction of law, the restrictions of justice, the confidence of the people, and the welfare of the community. Rapacity and instructions have been their predominant motives. Nor is it strange that, under the sway of a needy dependant, whose errand is the reparation of a ruined, or the acquisition of a needed fortune, a quarrel for the extension of prerogatives, and a pilfering of rights, the oppressor and the oppressed should form the only division in the State. We might illustrate this by the petty tyranny of a Barnard, influenced by his plotting insidious successor. The then polity was the mere practice of rapine to enrich individuals; chartered prerogatives the forms of peculation to rob the publick; commerce too much a system of snares and impositions; legislation, by turns, feeble and divided, cruel and oppressive; and the meetings of the Assemblies little more than a quarrel between their several branches, and the mere conception of necessary law, which, by the barbarity of the instructed Egyptian, was sure to die a foetus. The bridle of despotism was put into our jaws, and a military force threatened to chill our feelings and benumb our spirits. Restrictions and impositions on trade, with fines and forfeitures, were multiplied for the emolument of a Governour and Admiralty-Judge, a Commissioner, or a wretched informer: and even these profits accumulated, and plunder increased by compositions, bribery, and intrigue. These animals have been the incessant drains to our wealth and plagues to our Provinces.

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This was the period in which the present stain to humanity, the detestation of America, paved his way to the first seat of magistracy, by showing a head replete with dangerous designs to his country, and an inveterate hatred to the rights of civil society. Well educated in the Machiavelian school, he begun his exalted career flushed with the expectation of certain success. His revering disciples were exceedingly docile under his culture. The lessons he taught them may be learned from his letters. The schemes that he laid were as deep as the centre, and as black as they were deep. His accession to the chair filled many an honest heart with anxious concern, and almost every discerning head with a vigilant distrust. While congratulatory addresses were cooked up to his delicate taste by the deceiving and deceived, the Representatives of the people nobly spurned at the fawning servility, and proposed, in its stead, an address of condolence for the misfortunes of their country. This was very humiliating to one who so eagerly catched at the empty trash or unmerited applause. His sublimated system began gradually to creep from under its mask. The supreme inherent right of Parliamentwas totally denied. How to establish it, and punish its bold (and, to be sure, its traitorous) opposers, was his unwearied study. For the latter, the penalties of a premunire were thought an adequate measure. The man who had the unparalleled presumption to deny that himself, his wife, his children, his property, his life, his conscience, and his very all, were at the entire disposal, and bound in all cases whatsoever by the subjects of Great Britain, was to be put out of the protection of the law, his lands and tenements, goods and chattels forfeited to the King, and his body to remain in prison at the King' s pleasure, or during life. The former was to be effected by disguising, abusing, twisting, extending, and perverting the prerogatives of the Crown and the right of regulating trade, as founded upon the consent of the Colonies. From these premises was deduced his pitiful policy. These materials formed one of his infernal engines. With these instruments he was determined to coerce the nauseous dose. The prostituted hand of Royal prerogatives was sorely pressed on every side. The gripings of this he expected would blunt our senses, and render us unfeeling to the less obvious weight of Parliamentary pressure. We were to be familiarized to acts of Parliament, by constant and abominable expansions of the regulating power. By a pious, fraudulent delusion the principle was to be established. And then its exertions were too wanton in all their rigour. The experiment was tried: it failed of success. The Americans, says the European Cicero, augur misgovernment from principle, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breath. In the meantime, whole Colonies were to be annihilated, and swallowed up by their reluctant neighbours; Constitutions prostrated, and Charters puffed away. Broils, contentions, discords, and animosities were to be increased between Colony and Colony, and their attendants, rancour and revenge, maintained and cherished in every quarter. For the fomenting of the one, and food for the other, the benevolent, the humane, and the sanctified Mr˙ Hutchinson pledged his most engaging genius. The following are words taken from his published letters: "I wish every other Government may desert us, and that we may go to quarrelling one Government with another. I think," says he, under the conscious intoxication of his matchless genius, "I could find bones to throw among them, to continue contention, and prevent a renewal of their union."

A stranger to the comforts of unsullied purity, deaf to the voice of honest sincerity, hot in the pursuit of honour and wealth, tormented by the sight of American liberty, he was determined to sap her foundation by his insidious wiles, or perfidious stratagems. Those failing, his next resort was by open storm. Determined as he was, at any rate, that sooner or later she should strike to the displayed banner of despotick sway, he opened his doors to Court adulators, and his ear to his servile minions. Together they formed their plans, and hugged the expectations of riotously wantoning on the spoils of the subjugated. Together they turn their backs on virtue and the tenderest ties of the social connexion. The misfortunes and pains

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