THE SEDITIOUS MAN
Is a civil mutineer, and as all mutinies for the most part are for pay, if it were not for that he would never trouble himself with it. His business is to kindle and blow up discontents against the Government, that, when they are inflamed, he may have the fairer opportunity to rob and plunder, while those that are concerned are employed in quenching it. He endeavours to raise tumults and, if he can, civil war--a remedy which no man that means well to his country can endure to think on though the disease were never so desperate. He is a State mountebank, whose business is to persuade the people that they are not well in health, that he may get their money to make them worse. If he be a preacher, he has the advantage of all others of his tribe, for he has a way to vent sedition by wholesale; and as the foulest purposes have most need of the fairest pretences, so when sedition is masked under the veil of piety, religion, conscience, and holy duty, it propagates wonderfully among the rabble, and he vents more in an hour from the pulpit than others by news and politics can do in a week. Next him, writers and libellers are most pernicious, for though the contagion they disperse spreads slower and with less force than preaching, yet it lasts longer, and in time extends to more, and with less danger to the author, who is not easily discovered if he use any care to conceal himself. And therefore, as we see stinging-flies vex and provoke cattle most immediately before storms, so multitudes of those kinds of vermin do always appear to stir up the people before the beginning of all troublesome times, and nobody knows who they are or from whence they came, but only that they were printed the present year that they may not lose the advantage of being known to be new. Some do it only out of humour and envy, or desire to see those that are above them pulled down and others raised in their places, as if they held it a kind of freedom to change their governors, though they continue in the same condition themselves still, only they are a little better pleased with it in observing the dangers greatness is exposed to. He delights in nothing so much as civil commotions, and, like a porpoise, always plays before a storm. Paper and tinder are both made of the same material, rags, but he converts them both into the same again and makes his paper tinder.