text:  We have said that it is the decisive mark of a party writer to ascribe political and private vices to his opponents from which he represents his own side as exempt; and we have immediately afterwards said that the wide-spread corruption and constant promotion of influential imbecility which ever since 1688 has been the bane of Great Britain and the chief if not the sole cause of all the disasters we have undergone and of nine-tenths of the debts we have contracted is mainly to be ascribed to the Whigs who during the long period of seventy years immediately subsequent to the Revolution were exclusively in power and had the entire moulding of the constitution both in church and state in their hands