Originally published in 1814, Miles Wallingford is the conclusion to "Afloat and Ashore."

The anti-rent combination according to the author's conjectures, will prove to be one of two things in this community - the commencement of a dire revolution or the commencement of a return to the sounder nations and juster principles that prevailed among us thirty years since, than certainly prevail today. There is one favorable symptom discoverable in the deep-seated disease that pervades the social system: men dare, and do, lead more honestly and frankly with the condition of society in this country, than was done a few years since. The right, one that ought to be most dear to every freeman, has been recovered only by painful sacrifices and a stern resolution; but the pens of the country true to their owners' privileges, we should soon come to a just view of the sacred nature of private character, as well as the target-like vulnerability of public follies and public vice. It is certain that, for a series of dangerous years, notions just the reverse of this have prevailed among us, gradually rendering the American press equally the vehicle of the most atrocious personal calumny, and the most flatulent national self-adulation. It is under such a state of things that the few evils alluded to in this work have had their rise. The disease has already passed out of New York into Pennsylvania; it will spread, like any other epidemic, throughout the country; and there will soon be a severe struggle among us, between the knave and the honest man.