After pursuing this vein some time longer, the worthy functionary of the state showed a little of that cloven foot which seems to grow on all, even to the cleanest heels, who look to the popular voice for preferment. No matter who the man is, rich or poor, young or old, foolish or wise, he bows down before the idol of Numbers, and there worships. Votes being the one thing wanted, must be bought by sacrifices on the altar of conscience. Now it is by wild, and, half the time, impracticable schemes of philanthropy, that while they seem to work good to the majority, are quite likely to disregard the rights of the minority; now they are flourishes against negro slavery, or a revolution in favour of the oppressed inhabitants of Crim-Tartary, of the real state of which country we are all as ignorant as its inhabitants are ignorant of us; now, it’s an exemption law, to enable a man to escape from the payment of his just debts, directly in the teeth of the sound policy, not to say morality, that if a man owe he should be made to pay as long as he has anything to do it with; now, it is a hymn in praise of a liberty that the poet neither comprehends nor cares to look into farther than may suit his own selfish patriotism; and now, it is some other of the thousand modes adopted by the designing to delude the masses and advance themselves. On this occasion the District Attorney was very cautious, but he showed the cloven foot. He paid a passing tribute to the god of Numbers, worshipped before the hierarchy of votes. “Gentlemen,” he continued, “like myself, you are plain, unpretending citizens. Neither you, nor your wives and daughters, speak in foreign tongues, or play on foreign instruments of music. We have been brought up in republican simplicity, [God bless it! say we, could we ever meet with it,] and lay no claims to superiority of any sort. Our place is in the body of the nation, and there we are content to remain. We shall pay no respect to dress, accomplishments, foreign languages, or foreign music; but, the evidence sustaining us, will show the world that the law frowns as well on the great as on the little; on the pretending, as well as on the unpretending.” As these grandiose sentiments were uttered, several of the jurors half rose from their seats, in the eagerness to hear, and looks of approbation passed from eye to eye. This was accepted as good republican doctrine; no one there seeing, or feeling, as taste and truth would have shown, that the real pretension was on the side of an exaggerated self-esteem, that prompted to resistance ere resistance was necessary, under the influence of, perhaps, the lowest passion of human nature—we allude to envy. With a little more in the same vein, the District Attorney concluded his opening.