[A] King, ministers, and parliament.
[B] That the reader may see the value Junius placed on such men as Onslow, I will place before him a short address of Junius to the king: "As you are a young man, sir, who ought to have a life of happiness in prospect; as you are a husband, as you are a father (your filial duties I own have been religiously performed), is it bona fide for your interest or your honor, to sacrifice your domestic tranquillity, and to live in perpetual disagreement with your people, merely to preserve such a chain of beings as North, Barrington, Weymouth, Gower, Ellis, Onslow, Rigby, Jerry Dyson, and Sandwich? Their very names are a satire upon all government, and I defy the gravest of your chaplains to read the catalogue without laughing."
[C] Isaac Barré defended the colonies and opposed the Stamp Act in the House of Commons with "a display of eloquence, which astonished all who heard him." When the ministry in 1771 tried to suppress the practice of reporting the parliamentary debates, he denounced them and the House of Commons in the strongest and most sarcastic terms; and after closing his speech he "left the house, calling upon every honest man to follow him." The letters of Junius were afterwards attributed to him.
[D] "A simile from Mr. Burke." One is here forcibly reminded how prophetic this sarcasm is of what Mr. Paine will say in his Rights of Man, of Mr. Burke's imagery: "I have now to follow Mr. Burke through a pathless wilderness of rhapsodies." ... "His intention was to make an attack on the French revolution; but instead of proceeding with an orderly arrangement he has stormed it with a mob of ideas, tumbling over and destroying one another."
A REVOLUTIONIST.
The object of Junius was to produce a revolution in England, to dethrone the king, depose the ministry, dissolve Parliament, and bring the constitution back to its original principles. He defends, at the same time, the action of the American colonies, and encourages them to move on with the work.
It is, perhaps, noticeable to the historian, and especially if he studies the causes of human action, that great movements in behalf of human weal are at no given time confined to a particular locality, but that they, in a measure, span the world. They at least radiate till they affect the whole of a particular type of mankind. Nor is this attributable altogether to commerce and a social interchange of thought, for these take time; but it seems as though, at times, convulsions of thought instantaneously affect great classes of people widely separated by ocean or country. The study of mobs and riots in America, England, and France would lead to this conclusion. It is, however, not a mooted point, that the same cause which moved the colonies to action just prior to the revolution, at the same time convulsed the English nation. The tyranny of king, ministers, and Parliament put its heel on the neck of Englishmen as well as Americans. The people rose in rebellion there as well as here. Patriots arose in England as well as in America, and foremost among them all was Junius, for he fought the battle of freedom for the whole world.