"Ignorance and inconsideration, are the two great causes of the ruin of mankind."--This is an observation of Dr. _Tillotson_, with relation to the interest of his fellow-men, in a future and immortal state: But it is of equal truth and importance, if applied to the happiness of men in society, on this side the grave.--In the earliest ages of the world, _absolute Monarchy_ seems to have been the universal form of government.--Kings, and a few of their great counsellors and captains, exercised a cruel tyranny over the people who held a rank in the scale of intelligence, in those days, but little higher than the camels and elephants, that carried them and their engines to war. By what causes it was brought to pass, that the people in the middle ages, became more _intelligent_ in general, would not perhaps be possible in these days to discover: But the fact is certain, and wherever a general knowledge and sensibility have prevailed among the people, arbitrary government and every kind of oppression have lessened and disappeared in proportion.--Man has certainly an exalted soul! and the same principle in human nature; that aspiring noble principle, founded in benevolence and cherished by knowledge; I mean the love of power, which has been so often the cause of _slavery_, has, whenever freedom has existed, been the cause of freedom. If it is this principle, that has always prompted the princes and nobles of the earth, by every species of fraud and violence, to shake off all the limitations of their power; it is the same that has always stimulated the common people to aspire at independency, and to endeavour at confining the power of the great, within the limits of equity and reason. The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great--They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form an union and exert their strength--ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known, by the great, to be the temper of mankind, and they have accordingly laboured, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government--_Rights_, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws--_Rights_, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.