Page:Letters from a farmer in Pennsylvania - Dickinson - 1768.djvu/74

[&emsp;68&emsp;] the rewards of our care, can properly be called our own, so long it will be worth our while to be industrious and frugal. But if when we plow---sow---reap---gather---and thresh---we find, that we plow---sow---reap---gather---and thresh for others, whose PLEASURE is to be the SOLE LIMITATION how much they shall take, and how much they shall leave, should we repeat the unprofitable toil? Horses and oxen are content with that portion of the fruits of their work, which their owners assign them, in order to keep them strong enough to raise successive crops; but even these beasts will not submit to draw for their masters, until they are subdued by whips and goads.

us take care of our rights, and we therein take care of our prosperity. “SLAVERY IS EVER PRECEDED BY SLEEP.” Individuals may be dependent on ministers, if they please. ;and if you are not wanting to yourselves, you will have a proper regard paid you by those, to whom if you are not respectable, you will be contemptible. But---if we have already forgot the reasons that urged us, with unexampled unanimity, to exert ourselves two years agoif our zeal for the public good is worn out before the homespun cloaths, which it caused us to have madeif our resolutions are so faint, as by our present conduct to condemn our own late successful example---if we are not affected by any reverence for the memory of our ancestors, who transmitted to us that freedom in which they had been blest-if we are not animated by any regard for posterity, to whom, by the most sacred obligations, we are bound to deliver down the invaluable inheritance, indeed, any ministeror any tool of a ministeror any creature of a tool of a ministeror any lower instrument of administration, if lower there be, is a personage whom it may be dangerous to offend.