fjgz, Timothy Hairbrain. 5)1 



and cautiously applied ; always recollecting the good 

 old adage, that " a stitch in time saves nine." Let 

 the master tinkers, then, who have served a regular 

 apprenticefliip, be continually on the watch to see that 

 nothing goes far wrong ; but, as to the fellows with 

 strong arms only, and weighty hammers, give them, 

 some common job to work at, where, if they do no 

 good, they can do little harm. Who would ever think 

 of employing a blacksmith to repair aHarrison's time- 

 keeper ? Who would think of listening to the ravings 

 of an illiterate mechanic, who thought that he had dis- 

 covered the longitude, as thousands of such have se- 

 riously believed they had done ? But the constitution 

 of a government is a much more complicated machine 

 than a time-piece j and it requires much greater ta- 

 lents to discover, a priori, what would be right or 

 wrong, with regard to it, than to discover the longi- 

 tude. The speculations on this subject of More, Har- 

 rison, Locke, Montesquieu,Hume, Stewart, and Smith, 

 arc well known to be, in many particulars, only im- 

 practicable reveries. If the minds of such men then 

 have been unable to grasp this wide subject, in all its 

 extent, what are we to expect will be the result of the 

 speculations of butchers and taylors, porters and dray- 

 men, when they pretend to decide upon it ? These 

 are all respectable members of society when they 

 act in their own spheres, but when they depart from 



it they become truly ridiculous *' Non omnia poj- 



sumus omnes" IS an old and a just adage. "There 

 arc two points in politics," says a very ingenious 

 writer, whose works are too little known *, " very 

 hard to compafs. One is, to persuade legislators that 

 f Bcmham'i view of the Panopticon p. 66, 



