“My late Townsmen and Neighbours,—After living with you eleven years, in which you had uniform experience of my peaceful behaviour, in my attention to the quiet studies of my profession and those of philosophy, I was far from expecting the injuries which I and my friends have lately received from you. But you have been misled. By hearing the Dissenters, and particularly the Unitarian Dissenters, continually railed at, as enemies to the present government in Church and State, you have been led to consider any injury done to us as a meritorious thing, and, not having been better informed, the means were not attended to. When the _object_ was right you thought the _means_ could not be wrong. By the discourses of your teachers, and the exclamations of your superiors in general, drinking confusion and damnation to us (which is well known to have been their frequent practice), your bigotry has been excited to the highest pitch, and nothing has been said to you to moderate your passions, but everything to inflame them; hence, without any consideration on your part or on theirs, who ought to have known and taught you better, you were prepared for every species of outrage, thinking that whatever you could do to spite and injure us was for the support of Government, and especially the Church. In _destroying us_ you have been led to think _you did God_ and your country the most substantial _service_. “Happily the minds of Englishmen have a horror of _murder_, and therefore you did not, I hope, think of _that_, though by your clamorous demanding of _me_ at the hotel it is probable that at that time some of you intended me some personal injury. But what is the value of life when everything is done to make it wretched? In many cases there would be greater mercy in dispatching the inhabitants than in burning their houses. However, I infinitely prefer what I feel from _the spoiling of my goods_ to the disposition of those who have misled you. “You have destroyed the most truly valuable and useful apparatus of philosophical instruments that perhaps any individual in this or any other country was ever possessed of, in my use of which I annually spent large sums, with no pecuniary view whatever, but only in the advancement of science, for the benefit of my country and of mankind. You have destroyed a library corresponding to that apparatus which no money can re-purchase, except in a course of time. But what I feel far more, you have destroyed _manuscripts_, which have been the result of the laborious study of many years, and which I shall never be able to recompose; and this has been done to one who never did, or imagined you, any harm.