die was finally cast, to avert the calamity, the danger, and the ruin, which he saw impending. "Too well apprized of the contents of the papers, now at last laid before the House, I shall not take up their lordships' time in tedious and fruitless investigations, but shall seize the first moment to open the door of reconcilement; for every moment of delay is a moment of danger. As I have not the honor of access to his Majesty, I will endeavour to transmit to him, through the constitutional channel of this House, my ideas of America, to RESCUE him from the mis-advice of his present ministers. America, my lords, cannot be reconciled, she ought not to be reconciled to this country, till the troops of Britain are withdrawn from the continent; they are a bar to all confidence; they are a source of perpetual irritation; they threaten a fatal catastrophe. How can America trust you with the bayonet at her breast? How can she suppose that you mean less than bondage · or death? I therefore, my lords, move, that an humble address be presented to his Majesty, most humbly to advise and beseech his Majesty, that, in order to open the way towards an happy settlement of the dangerous troubles in America, it may graciously please his Majesty to transmit orders to general GAGE for removing his Majesty's forces from the town of Boston. I know not, my lords, who advised the present measures: I know not who advises to a perseverance and enforcement of them; but this I will say, that the authors of such advice ought to answer it at their utmost péril. I wish, my lords, not to lose a day in this urgent, pressing crisis: an hour now lost in allaying ferments in America may produce years of calamity. Never will I desert, in any stage of its progress, the conduct of this momentous business. Un less less fettered to my bed by the extremity of sickness, I will give it unremitting attention. I will knock at the gates of this sleeping and confounded ministry, and will, if it be possible, rouse them to a sense of their danger. The recall of your army I urge as necessarily preparatory to the restoration of your peace, By this it will appear that you are disposed to treat amicably and equitably, and to consider, revise, and repeal, if it should be found necessary, as I affirm it will, those violent acts and declations which have disseminated confusion throughout the empire. Resistance to these acts was necessary, and therefore just: and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or enslave America, who feels that tyranny is equally intolerable, whether it be exercised by an individual part of the Legislature, or by the collective bodies which compose it. The means of enforcing this thraldom are found to be as ridiculous and weak in practice as they are unjust in principle. Conceiving of general Gage as a man of humanity and understanding; entertaining, as I ever must, the highest respect and affection for the British troops, I feel the most anxious sensibility for their situation, pining in inglorious inactivity. You may call them an army of safety and defence, but they are in truth an army of impotence and contempt; and to make the folly equal to the disgrace, they are an army of irritation and vexation. Allay then the ferment prevailing in America by removing the obnoxious hostile cause. If you delay concession till your vain hope shall be accomplished of triumphantly dictating reconciliation, you delay for ever: the force of this country would be disproportionately exerted against a brave, generous, and united people, with arms in their hands, D 3 hands, and courage in their hearts-three millions of people, the genuine descendants of a valiant and pious ancestry, driven to those deserts by the narrow maxims of a superstitious tyranny. But is the spirit of persecution never to be appeased? Are the brave sons of those brave forefathers to inherit their sufferings, as they have inherited their virtues? Are they to sustain the infliction of the most oppressive and unexampled severity, beyond what history has related, or poetry has feigned ? Rhadamanthus habet durissima regna, Castigatque, auditque dolos. But the Americans must not be heard; they have been condemned unheard. The indiscriminate hand of vengeance has devoted thirty thousand British subjects of all ranks, ages, and descriptions to one common ruin. You may, no doubt, destroy their cities; you may cut them off from the superfluities, perhaps the conveniences of life; but, my lords, they will still despise your power, for they have yet remaining their woods and their liberty. What, though you march from town to town, from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you, in your progress of eighteen hundred miles of continent, animated with the same spirit of liberty and of resistance? This universal opposition to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things, and from the nature of man, and, above all, from the confirmed habits of thinking, from the spirit of whiggism, flourishing in America. The spirit, which now pervades America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship money in this country-the same spirit which rouzed all England to action at the revolution, and which established at a remote æra your liberties on the basis of that great fundamental maxim of the constitution, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast of every generous Briton? To maintain this principle is the common cause of the whigs on the other side of the Atlantic, and on this; it is liberty to liberty engaged. In this great cause they are immoveably allied: it is the alliance of God and nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven. As an Englishman, I recognize to the Americans their supreme unalterable right of property. As an American, I would equally recognize to England her supreme right of regulating commerce and navigation. This distinction is involved in the abstract nature of things: property is private, individual, absolute the touch of another annihilates it. Trade is an extended and complicated consideration: it reaches as far as ships can sail, or winds can blow: it is a vast and various machine. To regulate the numberless movements of its several parts, and to combine them in one harmonious effect, for the good of the whole, requires the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power of the empire. On this grand practical distinction, then, let us rest: taxation is theirs: commercial regulation is ours. As to the metaphysical refinements, attempting to shew that the Americans are equally free from legislative control and commercial restraint, as from taxation for the purpose of revenue, I pronounce them futile, frivolous, groundless, When your lordships have perused the papers transmitted us from America, when you consider the dignity, the firmness, and the wisdom with which the Americans have acted, you cannot but respect their cause, History, my lords, has been my fa vorite study; and in the celebrated writings of antiquity have I often admired the patriotism of Greece and Rome; but, my lords, I must declare and avow, that, in the master states of the world, I know not the people, nor the senate, who in such a complication of difficult circumstances, can stand in preference to the Delegates of America, assembled in General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be futile. Can such a national principled union be resisted by the tricks of office or ministerial manœuvres? Heaping papers on your table, or counting your majorities on a division, will not avert or postpone the hour of danger. It must arrive, my lords, unless these fatal acts are done away: it must arrive in all its horrors; and then these boastful ministers, in spite of all their confidence and all their manoeuvres, shall be com pelled to hide their heads. But it is not repealing this or that act of parliament; it is not repealing a piece of parchment, that can restore America to your bosom : you must repeal her fears and resentments, and then you may hope for her love and gratitude. But now, insulted with an armed force, irritated with an hostile array be fore her eyes, her concessions, if you could force them, would be suspicious, and insecure. But it is more than evident that you cannot force them to your unworthy terms of submission: it is impossible: WE ourselves shall be forced ultimately to retract: let us retract while we can, not when we must. I repeat it, my lords, we shall one day be forced to undo these violent acts of oppression : they must be repealed; you will repeal them. I pledge myself for it, that you will in the end repeal them: I stake my reputation on it: I will consent to be taken for |