r 218 THE GRATER; privileges themselves, they dislike that others should enjoy them; and association places no restraints on their cupi dity. Pennock, once in the hands of " the people," was obliged to maintain their rights, or what some among them chose to call their rights ; and he authorized the attorney- general to bring an action of ejectment against the party in possession. Some pretty hard-faced trickery was at tempted in the way of legislation, in order to help along the claim of the public ; for, if the truth must be said, the public is just as wont to resort to such unworthy means to effect its purposes as private individuals, when it is deemed necessary. But there was little fear of the " people s" failing; they made the law, and they administered it, through their agents ; the power being now so completely in their hands that it required twice the usual stock of human virtue to be able to say them nay, as had formerly been the case. God help the man whose rights are to be maintained against the masses, when the immediate and dependent nominees of those masses are to sit iji judgment. ! If the public, by any inadvertency, have had the weakness to select servants that are superior to human infirmities, and who prefer to do right rather than to do as their masters would have them, it is a weakness that experience will be sure to correct, and which will not be often repeated. The trial of this cause kept the Woolstons at the crater a week longer than they would have remained. When the cause was submitted to the jury, Mr. Attorney-General had a great deal to say about aristocracy and privileged orders, as well as about the sacred rights of the people. To hear him, one might have imagined that the Woolstons were princes, in the full possession of their hereditary states, and who were dangerous to the liberties of the mass, in stead of being what they really were, citizens without one right more than the meanest man in the colony, and with even fewer chances of maintaining their share of these common rights, in consequence of the prejudice, and jea lousy, and most of all, the envy, of the majority. Woolston argued his own cause, making a clear, forcible and manly appeal to the justice and good sense of the jury, in vindi cation of his claims; which, on every legal as well as equitable principle, was out of all question such as every I
