Build him a pedestal and say—Stand there, And be our admiration and our praise. They roll themselves before him in the dust, Then most deserving in their own account When most extravagant in his applause, As if exalting him they raised themselves. Thus by degrees, self-cheated of their sound And sober judgment that he is but man, They demi-deify and fume him so That in due season he forgets it too. Inflated and astrut with self-conceit He gulps the windy diet, and ere long, Adopting their mistake, profoundly thinks The world was made in vain if not for him. Thenceforth they are his cattle: drudges, born To bear his burdens, drawing in his gears, And sweating in his service. His caprice Becomes the soul that animates them all. He deems a thousand, or ten thousand lives, Spent in the purchase of renown for him An easy reckoning, and they think the same. Thus kings were first invented, and thus kings Were burnished into heroes, and became The arbiters of this terraqueous swamp; Storks among frogs, that have but croaked and died. Strange that such folly, as lifts bloated man To eminence fit only for a god, Should ever drivel out of human lips, Even in the cradled weakness of the world! Still stranger much, that when at length mankind Had reached the sinewy firmness of their youth, And could discriminate and argue well On subjects more mysterious, they were yet Babes in the cause of freedom, and should fear And quake before the gods themselves had made. But above measure strange, that neither proof Of sad experience, nor examples set By some whose patriot virtue has prevailed, Can even now, when they are grown mature In wisdom, and with philosophic deeps Familiar, serve to emancipate the rest! Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone To reverence what is ancient, and can plead A course of long observance for its use, That even servitude, the worst of ills, Because delivered down from sire to son, Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing. But is it fit, or can it bear the shock Of rational discussion, that a man, Compounded and made up like other men Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust And folly in as ample measure meet, As in the bosoms of the slaves he rules, Should be a despot absolute, and boast Himself the only freeman of his land? Should when he pleases, and on whom he will, Wage war, with any or with no pretence Of provocation given, or wrong sustained, And force the beggarly last doit, by means That his own humour dictates, from the clutch Of poverty, that thus he may procure His thousands, weary of penurious life, A splendid opportunity to die? Say ye, who (with less prudence than of old Jotham ascribed to his assembled trees In politic convention) put your trust I’ th’ shadow of a bramble, and recline