第50章

But your condition is the reverse of theirs.Every thing you suffer you have sought: nay, had you created mischiefs on purpose to inherit them, you could not have secured your title by a firmer deed.The world awakens with no pity it your complaints.You felt none for others; you deserve none for yourselves.Nature does not interest herself in cases like yours, but, on the contrary, turns from them with dislike, and abandons them to punishment.You may now present memorials to what court you please, but so far as America is the object, none will listen.The policy of Europe, and the propensity there in every mind to curb insulting ambition, and bring cruelty to judgment, are unitedly against you; and where nature and interest reinforce with each other, the compact is too intimate to be dissolved.

Make but the case of others your own, and your own theirs, and you will then have a clear idea of the whole.Had France acted towards her colonies as you have done, you would have branded her with every epithet of abhorrence; and had you, like her, stepped in to succor a struggling people, all Europe must have echoed with your own applauses.But entangled in the passion of dispute you see it not as you ought, and form opinions thereon which suit with no interest but your own.You wonder that America does not rise in union with you to impose on herself a portion of your taxes and reduce herself to unconditional submission.You are amazed that the southern powers of Europe do not assist you in conquering a country which is afterwards to be turned against themselves; and that the northern ones do not contribute to reinstate you in America who already enjoy the market for naval stores by the separation.You seem surprised that Holland does not pour in her succors to maintain you mistress of the seas, when her own commerce is suffering by your act of navigation; or that any country should study her own interest while yours is on the carpet.

Such excesses of passionate folly, and unjust as well as unwise resentment, have driven you on, like Pharaoh, to unpitied miseries, and while the importance of the quarrel shall perpetuate your disgrace, the flag of America will carry it round the world.The natural feelings of every rational being will be against you, and wherever the story shall be told, you will have neither excuse nor consolation left.With an unsparing hand, and an insatiable mind, you have desolated the world, to gain dominion and to lose it; and while, in a frenzy of avarice and ambition, the east and the west are doomed to tributary bondage, you rapidly earned destruction as the wages of a nation.

At the thoughts of a war at home, every man amongst you ought to tremble.The prospect is far more dreadful there than in America.Here the party that was against the measures of the continent were in general composed of a kind of neutrals, who added strength to neither army.There does not exist a being so devoid of sense and sentiment as to covet "unconditional submission," and therefore no man in America could be with you in principle.Several might from a cowardice of mind, prefer it to the hardships and dangers of opposing it; but the same disposition that gave them such a choice, unfitted them to act either for or against us.But England is rent into parties, with equal shares of resolution.The principle which produced the war divides the nation.Their animosities are in the highest state of fermentation, and both sides, by a call of the militia, are in arms.No human foresight can discern, no conclusion can be formed, what turn a war might take, if once set on foot by an invasion.She is not now in a fit disposition to make a common cause of her own affairs, and having no conquests to hope for abroad, and nothing but expenses arising at home, her everything is staked upon a defensive combat, and the further she goes the worse she is off.

There are situations that a nation may be in, in which peace or war, abstracted from every other consideration, may be politically right or wrong.When nothing can be lost by a war, but what must be lost without it, war is then the policy of that country; and such was the situation of America at the commencement of hostilities: but when no security can be gained by a war, but what may be accomplished by a peace, the case becomes reversed, and such now is the situation of England.