As this power is attached to certain situations, it is their duty
to contend for these situations. Without a proscription of others, they
are bound to give to their own party the preference in all things; and
by no means, for private considerations, to accept any offers of power
in which the whole body is not included; nor to suffer themselves to be
led, or to be controlled, or to be overbalanced, in office or in
council, by those who contradict the very fundamental principles on
which their party is formed, and even those upon which every fair
connection must stand. Such a generous contention for power, on such
manly and honourable maxims, will easily be distinguished from the mean
and interested struggle for place and emolument. The very style of such
persons will serve to discriminate them from those numberless imposters
who have deluded the ignorant with professions incompatible with human
practice, and have afterwards incensed them by practices below the level
of vulgar rectitude.
POLITICAL CONNECTIONS.
Every profession, not excepting the glorious one of a soldier, or the
sacred one of a priest, is liable to its own particular vices, which,
however, form no argument against those ways of life; nor are the vices
themselves inevitable to every individual in those professions. Of such
a nature are connections in politics; essentially necessary for the full
performance of our public duty, accidentally liable to degenerate into
faction.
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