57-12-01

DEDICATION

TO THE

SWINISH MULTITUDE.

SOVEREIGN SWINE!

FOR your instruction and amusement, to improve your grovelling propensities, by teaching a due respect for yourselves, and a just estimate of your superiors, this history of your chief drivers, from the first mighty hog of Normandy to the present great and glorious hog of Hanover, is now dedicated.

When you read of their noble deeds in Church and State, of their exploits in the field and their wisdom in the cabinet; when you read of their fornications, their drinkings, their swearings, their oath-breakings, their adulteries, and abominations; when you read of their loving kindnesses to your predecessors; then will you marvel greatly, you will be filled with gratitude for their goodness, admiration for their wisdom, and you will say in your hearts, Truly, our leaders have been the chief of swine, and deserved, par excellence, to be the drivers thereof.

The title vouchsafed unto you by your sublime, beautiful, and pensioned godfather, EDMUND BURKE, you have long borne without the inheritance. To you it has been a barren sceptre, a title of great honour, but no emolument: instead of the comforts of swine, instead of your days being spent in eating, and drinking, and sleeping, they have been spent in watching, and toiling, and fasting. You have carried burdens like asses; you have laboured like horses; you have been kicked, cuffed, and beaten, like spaniels; you have been insulted and derided like monkeys; you have been kept as hungry as ravens, and you are now as lean as hounds.

In truth, you have not been the real swine of the land, only the feeders of swine; whom you have fed in courts, and churches, and palaces, where they wallow in ease, and luxury, and ignorance; where they feed, not on the husks, but the kernels; not on the crumbs of the rich, but the inheritance of the poor.