THE LINES ABOVE, with their sharp, seditious edge, encapsulate some of Edward Rushton's main ethical and political concerns, as characteristically does in its entirety the piece of writing from which they are excerpted. The poem in question, ‘Superstition. A Fragment’, is positioned in the 1824 posthumous edition of Poems and Other Writings as the concluding single poem (pp. 137–40 (pp. 137–38)), and precedes the three final pieces – i.e., the West Indian Eclogues, the Expostulatory Letter to George Washington, and the essay on the ‘Causes of the Dissimilarity of Colour in the Human Species’. In it, a number of manifestly recurrent meaning-making paths traversing Rushton's writing corpus can be discerned. These include the statement of the right, which is also, prominently, a moral duty, actively to assert one's entitlement to ‘liberty’; the direct, inquiring address to ‘Britons’, which is also a meditation on the state of the world, as it were, as to the enjoyment of freedom and rights (‘Britons, yes! | Seven hundred millions of your fellow men […] | Now drag the servile chain’, p. 138); the assertion of universal equality under the same sun (‘Yon radiant orb, vast emblem of the Power | Who form'd him [man], beams alike on all mankind’, p. 139), and regardless of ethnic belonging (‘whate'er [man's] tint, swart, brown, or fair’, p. 139).

The poem appeared both as a distinct text and anthologized in a number of editions over the 1790s. The earliest version is recorded under the title ‘Human Debasement: A Fragment’. It was also associated with another poetic text, ‘On the Origin of Kings’, and ascribed to one ‘R[obert] Thompson’, a ‘ballad writer’ who edited a number of radical songbooks. Importantly, one edition of the two poems together was printed by Daniel Isaac Eaton and includes an opening piece that gives the chapbook its title. This is addressed To the Public, alias ‘The Swinish Multitude’, and signed ‘R. Thompson’, which presumably led to the identification of the latter as the author of both poems; the title essay reverberates the controversy sparked by Edmund Burke's infamous catchphrase.