Here it is easy to recognize industry, facility, boldness. He was not afraid to speak out, nor did he shrink from coping with those who commanded the public attention,--joining issue directly with Burke, “in answer to his printed speech, _said to be spoken_ in the House of Commons on the 22d of March, 1775,”[440] being that famous masterpiece, on “Conciliation with America,” so much read, so often quoted, and so highly placed among the efforts of human genius. The Dean used plain language, charging the great orator with excelling “in the art of ambiguous expressions,” and at all times having one general end in view, “to amuse with tropes and figures and great swelling words,” and hoping, that, while emulating the freedom of Burke in examining the writings and opinions of others, he should do it “with more decency and good manners.”[441] More than once the Dean complains that the orator had classed him by name with what he called “court vermin.”[442] As early as 1766, in the heats of the Stamp Act, he entered the lists by an unamiable pamphlet, entitled “A Letter from a Merchant in London to his Nephew in North America, relative to the Present Posture of Affairs in the Colonies.” Here appears the vigorous cynicism of his nature. The mother country is vindicated, and the Colonies are told that “the complaint of being unrepresented is entirely false and groundless,” inasmuch as every member of Parliament, when once chosen, becomes “the equal guardian of all,” and “_our_ Birminghams, Manchesters, Leeds, Halifaxes, &c., and _your_ Bostons, New Yorks, and Philadelphias are all as _really_, though not so nominally, represented as any part whatsoever of the British Empire.”[443] In the same spirit he ridiculed the pretensions of the Colonists, putting into their mouths the words: “What! an Island! a spot such as this to command the great and mighty Continent of North America! Preposterous! A Continent, whose inhabitants double every five-and-twenty years! who, therefore, within a century and an half will be upwards of an hundred and twenty millions of souls! Forbid it, Patriotism, forbid it, Politics, that such a great and mighty Empire as this should be held in subjection by the paltry Kingdom of Great Britain! _Rather let the seat of empire be transferred; and let it be fixed where it ought to be, namely, in Great America!_”[444] And then declaring “the calculations themselves both false and absurd,” taunting the Colonists with inability to make the mother country “a province of America,” and depicting the evils that will ensue to them from separation, he announces, that, “having been surfeited with the bitter fruits of American Republicanism, they will heartily wish and petition to be again united to the mother country.”[445]