THE ADDRESS OF THE PEOPLE OF GREAT BRITAIN TO THE INHABITATION OF AMERICA.*

FRIENDS AND COUNTRYMEN: We have seen the three Addresses of your Congress, the first of which is directed to us, the next to you, and the last to his Majesty; and we, wish we could add that we had not seen their Address to the French Inhabitants of Quebec; because it flatters them, provided they adopt the projects of the Congress, with the protection of a religion which the Congress, in their Address to us, say is fraught with "Impiety, Bigotry, Persecution, Murder, and Rebellion," and therefore complain of Parliament for protecting; and because it proposes a social compact with a people whose genius and Government, the Congress, in their Addresses to you and us, represent as incompatible with freedom. But the views intended to be compassed by the last of these Papers, we impute to those who framed it, and not to you. For to men generous and open as you are, the integrity of whose intentions we believe corresponds to our own, we will not permit ourselves to impute insidious views or insidious arts. We give you a generous credit, because we expect it from you.

In our turn we address you, not as foes; not as communities, which would league yourselves with Frenchmen against us; not as individuals who would conceal the hatred which you have, or stab under pretence of the love which you have not; but as our friends and our countrymen. God forbid these endearing appellations should ever be ex changed for those of Enemy and Traitor; for the flame of liberty which burns in our breasts, we revere in yours. Your services in the late wars, with the oblivion of which you reproach us, we remember well. Your industry, your virtue, and your piety, we honour; because we believe that those who stand in awe of the estimation of their own minds, and fear their God, will seldom go far in a wrong path.

We wish, we could forget, as easily as we forgive, the two modes by which your Congress proposes to disappoint the wishes of Britain for the good of America; the one threatens War; the other a Suspension of Trade. We mean not to insult you; we wish not to offend you; we know threats would be thrown out in vain to you; they exasperate instead of intimidating the free. But we owe to you, to ourselves, to our holy religion, and to that system of glory and liberty involved in the united power of the British Empire, and to be dissolved alone by the dissolution of its parts, and which we wish to last till time shall be no more, to give you our thoughts upon those two modes of opposition, with freedom and with truth. So may Heaven deal kindly with us and our posterity in the hour of need, as we mean kindness and not unkindness to you and your posterity, in what we are now to say to you on these heads.

We speak first of the first of them, to wit: the project of a warlike opposition on your part against us; because we will not conceal from you it is the most alarming to us; because it ought to be so to you, and yet is not. No people situated as you are, can hope for success in war, unless they are possessed of four things before they engage in it: fortified Towns to secure the persons of their people, and intercept the incursions and advance of their enemies; a disciplined Army to defend their lands; a Navy to protect their Seas and Rivers; and not only a great annual Revenue, but the capacity of funding it, so as by borrowing present capitals on the credit of future interests, to throw the abilities of several years into one. And this last article is, perhaps, in modern times, of more importance than all the others put together; because, in modern times, the success of war depends more on the longest purse than on the longest sword. Now, you have not a single walled Town, nor a single disciplined Regiment, nor a single Ship-of-War, nor a single Fund on which moneyed men would lend you a month's expense of an armament; and your annual Revenue is so small as hardly to deserve the name of one. You are Englishmen. We appeal to that good sense which distinguishes Englishmen. Lay causes and effects, circumstances and their consequences together. Can you hope for success in such a war?

Success do we say! Your destruction is inevitable. No country and people were ever so peculiarly ill-situated and circumstanced for a war with us, as you are at this instant. You are to encounter, after the very career of victory, that dreadful period which, inflaming military men with the remembrance of late glories, and confidence of future success, raises the victors above themselves; a veteran Army lately come from carrying conquest wherever it carried colours, and a veteran Navy lately come from sweeping the Seas of all enemies in all quarters of the globe; and to measure your trifling revenue, not more than seventy-five thousand Pounds a year, against that of a Nation which has a sinking fund of between two and three millions a year, and which, in the last war, was able to expend seventeen millions in one year. Your Towns are built all to the edge of deep water, so as to be within reach not only of cannon shot, but even of pistol-shot. Your country-houses and estates lie generally on the banks of deep Rivers. The most valuable part of your fortunes in the Southern Provinces, is composed of slaves, ready to rebel against their masters, or run away from them on the appearance of an enemy. Your Coasts, by the large inlets of Bays and Rivers, are easily commanded.

To give only one example. Two twenty-gun Ships stationed at the Capes of Virginia, where the Sea is not more than two or this leagues over, and another in Albemarle Sound, with two or three armed Sloops to attend them, could lock up altogether the very best part of North Carolina, and the whole of two of your noblest Provinces, Virginia and Maryland, that is, a Coast of six hundred miles in extent, A war with Britain must expose you to calamities from which even demons would turn their eyes. The most singular spectacle to be found in all the records of history, might, in the space of one little summer, or half a summer, be exhibited in America. For in that short space of time, in a country above two thousand miles in extent, enriched with the beauties of art and of nature, and inhabited by a virtuous, polished, and free people, every Town, without the exception of one, might be reduced to ashes by our Ships-of-War; all your country-houses and estates ravaged, not by the slow advances of Armies, but by the rapid courses of the barges of those Ships; or those Towns and estates, if not destroyed, laid at least under the most grievous contributions. Your slaves lost, or become your masters; yourselves fled for protection from them to the woods, or to hide you from your own shame; your trade annihilated; and your vessels and seamen captive in the Ports of that enemy whose rage you had provoked; your demagogues, now so bold when there is no danger, would then be the first to fly from its approach; for the valiant are modest, but the restless and noisy are always timid; your spirit alone would be left to you; that spirit which, judging of you by ourselves, we know we cannot conquer but by friendship.

Do you trust to foreign aids in such a conflict? We doubt not you would get them. Your and our felicity is the envy of all Nations. Slaves always hate the free. Many Nations will rejoice to disturb that felicity. Sad aids! where every victory of your allies would remind you over whom it was gained, and remove still further and further from your eyes, that sweet equality, that high station of English liberty which you and we alone, of all human kind, once possessed. Will these auxiliaries conquer for you and not for themselves? Will the inquisition of Spain make a Protestant cause independent? Will the despotism of France establish a new Empire of liberty, after having been stopped in her career to universal monarchy by an old one? Your posterity will bless the memory of those ancestors who fled from natively rants, but curse the memory of those who subjected them to foreign ones.

In the prospect of such a struggle, do you feel nothing for our distress? in being obliged to punish those whom we pity, to crush that spirit, in which, amidst all its errours, we recognise our own, and to counteract the ways of Prov-

* A Pamphlet having lately made its appearance in this country, entitled "The Address of the People of Great Britain to the Inhabitants of America," it may not he amiss to inform the Publick that this Pamphlet was wrote by Sir John Dalrymple, at the express request of Lord North; by the same Sir John Dalrymple, who, at the request of the best of Princes, some time ago wrote and published his Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, calculated almost solely to extirpate the very idea of patriotism, by endeavouring to condemn to infamy the memory of the two most celebrated patriots mentioned in British history, the illustrious and celebrated RUSSELL and SIDNEY.

Several letters now in this Colony, some from Sir John himself, prove and acknowledge him the author of the Pamphlet.—Va. Gazette.