printer, upon a moderate computation in the present state, will amount to seven or eight hundred pounds a year. Sterling, clear of all deductions. I mention this to show how great the demand is and consequently how prudent it may be for the government to take care with what matter it is supplied.
"I beg leave to refer Your Lordship to the inclosed newspapers for an account of general occurrances. Nothing, to the best of my knowledge, is inserted in them, as New York intelligence, but matters of fact as they have arisen. This little business affords me some amusement, where I have no books and few friends, and engages a part of my time with the satisfaction I am otherwise deprived of, of doing some service to the cause of my King and country."[1]
Thomas Jones, the Loyalist historian, affords us further enlightenment concerning the frame of mind of the opposition as to the attacks made on them by the patriots. It was in the office of Samuel Loudon—who afterward (January 17, 1776,) established the New York Packet, later being obliged to move it to Fishkill while the British occupied New York—that a reply was to be printed to Thomas Paine's "Common Sense." Loudon unquestionably was a Whig, but according to the account of Jones, Alexander McDougall, Isaac Sears and other "inveterate republicans "having one night imbibed plentifully of "rumbo "(the strong man's drink of the day) went to the house of Loudon aiid pulled him out of bed. Disregarding the fact that he was both "a Presbyterian and a Republican," they took the manuscript away from him and destroyed all the copies that he had printed. It is doubtful if this "Presbyterian and Republican" printer was much alarmed over the visit, as
- ↑ Stevens, Facsimiles, Nos. 2044-2046.
