But in this land of liberty, of general wealth, curiosity, and idleness, where there is scarce a human creature so poor that it cannot afford to buy or hire a Paper or a Pamphlet, or so busy that it cannot find leisure to read it; where every man, woman, and child, is, by instinct, birth, and inheritance, a politician; where the ordinary subjects of common conversation turn not, as in most countries, upon the impertinent trivial occurrences of the week or the day, nor on the small concerns, offices, and duties of private and social life; but on the greater and the more important objects of war, negociations, peace, laws, and the public and general weal; where men are more solicitous about the integrity and abilities of a lord commissioner of the treasury, or of a secretary of state, than the fidelity of their own wives, the chastity of their daughters, their sons, or their own honour and virtue; and where, like the virtuous citizens of Rome and Sparta, they unreluctantly offer up all the slenderer ties of blood, the endearments of love, the connexions of friendship, and the obligations of private gratitude, daily sacrifices and victims to the commonwealth; in such a country, the dullest Pamphlet may have a fair chance of gaining some readers, provided it be a political Pamphlet; whilst a treatise on religion or philosophy, unless the writer of it should happen to be thoroughly master of his subject, and know how to treat it with uncommon genius and learning, would meet with the fate it deserved, and be received with universal neglect.