Page:Letters of Junius, volume 1 (Woodfall, 1772).djvu/43

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PREFACE.
xxix

profit or personal satisfaction to You?—With the greatest unappropriated revenue of any prince in Europe, have we not seen You reduced to such vile, and sordid distresses, as would have conducted any other man to a prison?—With a great military, and the greatest naval power in the known world, have not foreign nations repeatedly insulted You with impunity?—Is it not notorious that the vast revenues, extorted from the labour and industry of your subjects, and given You to do honour to Yourself and to the nation, are dissipated in corrupting their representatives?—Are You a prince of the House of Hanover, and do You exclude all the leading Whig families from your councils?—Do you profess to govern according to Law, and is it consistent with that profession, to impart your confidence and affection to those men only, who, though now perhaps detached from the desperate cause of the pretender, are marked in this country by an hereditary attachment to high and arbitrary principles of government?—Are you so infatuated as to take the sense of your people from the representation of ministers, or from the shouts of a mob, notoriously hired to surround your coach, or stationed at a theatre?