A letter to a country clergyman, occasioned by his address to Lord Teignmouth — Key Ideas to Explore

ersons of every denomination, some country physician had stepped from his obscurity, and opened a smart attack upon them. Suppose him to have contended with all the gravity in the world, “that the object of a Society is not to be known from its public declaration in print;” {9b} that Societies which afterwards found their way “to the Old Bailey, or the Maidstone assizes,” had announced themselves to the world by “printed declarations of their reasons, objects, and principles;” {9c} and that for his own part, though he saw in their President a nobleman, “for whose head and heart he had the highest respect,” and among their supporters “many respectable names, with which he should be happy to place his own;” {10a} yet because they received guineas from quacks and empirics, as well as from regulars and licentiates in medicine, he considered the whole Society as a dangerous combination against the health of the community, and a conspiracy for effecting the diabolical design of poisoning his Majesty’s subjects. What, Sir, would you think of such a worthy gentleman? You would not question his sincerity, for no man who was not “horribly afraid” {10b} would intimate suspicions for which he was likely to gain so little credit among mankind: but I think you would feel yourself at liberty to question something about him, which if it did not provoke your resentment, might deservedly enough excite your compassion.

I am glad to find, as I advance farther into your pages, that things are not quite so bad as I had apprehended. “Far be it from me to say,” you tell his Lordship, “that you preside over an association of men combined for designs altogether bad; that you patronize and protect a Society, whose objects and principles are wilfully nefarious.” {10c} Now though this apology for insinuations which might as well have been withheld, is not wholly purged from bile, yet I confess it gives me pleasure to see it made at all; because it delivers _me_ from the logical difficulty of proving a negative, and _you_ from the logical disgrace of requiring it.

At present then it seems, that the majority of this Society, though weak and deceivable, are not Jacobinical or designing men. It is not within their _present_ intention to “pursue an object of an evil tendency in a close and clandestine manner, under favour of a public declaration of different, and” even “a contrary character.” {11a} Nay, so little are they suspected of being _as yet_ “wilfully nefarious,” that if his Lordship can give you such a security as you require, for the maintenance of its original intentions, you think the Society “will be what it proposes,” and you “shall be proud to rank” your “name, and make exertion under his protection.” {11b}

I do assure you, Sir, that my jealousies on this particular are quite as much alive as yours can be. I know how apt Societies are to depart from the principles upon which their original association was formed; and I am half inclined to think, that in this and other parts of your pamphlet you are reading a lesson to some Societies in the metropolis, that I could name. However, I do not absolutely affirm that such is your intention; for though I might take advantage of your own axiom, and suspect your “declaration in print” to be _one_ thing and your real object _another_, yet I should think it scarcely decorous to say so. Besides, it is very possible after all, that the whole may have been the result of accident; and that you had no design whatever of publishing the _actual_ state of one Society, when you were merely predicting the _future_ state of another.