idence, in rearing future Empires of freemen in future ages, pleasing to itself. Unhappy we! Ungenerous you! You abuse that tenderness which you know we cannot throw off for you. We dwell on the repetition of the sentiment, that we feel for you as nurseries of freemen, in which God and Nature are interested, and for which to God and Nature we are responsible. We will not attempt to harden ourselves against a remorse, which we know would follow our successes against you. You need not, till a cruel extremity comes upon us, fear the sword of your parent country uplifted against you. Perhaps, even then, it would drop from our hands bedewed with our tears, not with your blood. The mean amongst you know this our weakness, and insult it; but from the generous we will expect a more generous return.

With respect to the commercial project of opposition, which consists in the resolution not to Export or Import, proposed by your Congress, and perhaps, though not yet spoke out by the Members of it, in resolutions not to pay the millions due by America to the British Merchants, which would be the consequence of the other, if the other could take effect; you may think that by these means you may force the Mercantile interest to desert the cause of their country; strip us of our Trade and Manufactures; reduce our West India Islands to misery, from the want of provisions, and of a market for the produce of their estates; and, by the stoppage of the usual publick taxes, to pay the interest of the publick debts, bring a publick bankruptcy upon Britain.

Be not deceived in the first of these prospects. Amidst the disgrace of civil dissension, preserve still national honour, otherwise vengeance, private as well as publick, will overtake you. The Merchant whom you defraud of one part of his fortune, will not complain of being obliged to lay put another part to recover it; and too surely in the end you will repay his losses with usury. Instead of making him desert the cause of his country, the violation of faith will only attach him the more firmly to it. Rest not your opinions on the frivolousness of publick petitions or addresses, presented by bodies of Merchants. Richard Cromwell was pressed in sixteen hundred addresses, to take that Government upon him, which a few months afterwards his addressers took from him. Innumerable addresses were presented to James the Second, in favour of that dispensing power, which the men who presented them soon after converted into a reason for dethroning him. If you wish to know the sentiments of one of those Mercantile Petitioners, go to his counting-house or dining table: he will tell you he signed a Petition for you, because his neighbour did it, or to hurt a Minister, or to appear of importance in his business, or to keep rioters in America from plundering his effects, of to prevent other people from becoming more popular in business there than himself. But ask him if he is sincere, he will laugh at your credulity, and he will have reason; for do you think he is to prefer you to himself, or bear favour to those who would turn the streams of trade from his door, and disperse them among all neighbouring Nations?

But your deception will be still more fatal in the second of the prospects, which the Resolutions proposed by your Congress may open to you, namely, the downfall of the Trade and Manufactures of England, There, are two essential differences between your situation and ours in the quarrel of children, which your Congress would draw both of us into. The first essential difference is, that you have no market, or hardly any market, for your commodities, except Britain or her Dominions; but the world is our market. Whilst our Merchants have large stocks and larger credit, our people much industry and more ingenuity, and while mankind have wants natural or artificial, to be supplied, our Merchants will not want commissions, our Ships cargoes, or our Manufacturer employment. The channels, of trade will be changed, but they will not be dried up. The other essential difference is, that every stoppage of your trade will be a loss to you; but in many articles, and these the most material, the loss will fall not upon us but upon others. For example, if you salt not your usual quantity of fish and other provisions, because you will not send them to our West Indies, or to England, you will not, indeed, have occasion for the quantity of Salt which has been usually imported into America; but the loss will fall on other countries; for we send you no Salt. If your Southern Provinces will not take Osnaburghs from Britain, for the clothing of their slaves, nine-tenths of the loss will fall not on us, but on Germany; for we are accustomed to send you only a trifling quantity of our own making. We repeat it again, we wish not to offend, we mean not to threaten; but since we have mentioned these two articles, we must let you know, that an Act of Parliament, which should prohibit the importation of them, and of one other article, to wit, Molasses, into America, would desolate your Provinces without the aid of Armies or Navies. If you receive no Osnaburghs, the most valuable part of the stock on your estates in the Southern Provinces, your slaves, must waste away by diseases. If you receive no Salt, the most valuable part of your wealth in the Northern and even in some of your Southern Provinces, your herds and fish, will be of little more use than to cover your dunghills. Your poor would suffer from the want of salt provisions, on which they chiefly live; and we doubt, accustomed to the use of Salt as Europeans are, whether either rich or poor could live without Salt, more than without Water. If you received not Molasses, the circulation of the greatest branch of your internal commerce and manufactures must stop from the North to the South, and from the South to the North; and yet, the loss of the Molasses trade to you, would be no loss to our West India Islands, because it is well known to yourselves, that nine-tenths of the Molasses which you consume, are French and not English.

When the effects of the powers which we have to become your executioners, would be so fatal unto you, do you imagine that we can believe that you will execute yourselves? Communities, as well as individuals, have, indeed, sometimes their periods of frenzy. During such periods you may, by the stoppage of trade, do much mischief us, and we to you. But the mischief which you can do to us is finite that which we can do to you is infinite.

The third consequence of the Resolutions proposed by your Congress, namely, the miseries to be inflicted by means of them upon our West India Islands, would recoil with double force upon yourselves. Your Congress have got you enemies enough; do not strive to multiply them. You depend more on those Islands, than they do upon you. Without them you would be without even a market for the most lucrative part of the produce of your estates, your provisions and lumber. Men do not break glass windows with guineas. The vast balance on your trade to those Islands, shows what you would suffer in the loss of it.

If you hope, upon the breach of trade with us and our Dominions, to get Salt, Osnaburghs, and Molasses, from other countries, or their Plantations, your hopes will be in vain, Do you think that our Planters or we would sit quietly down and see the system of the Navigation laws violated, to injure them and defraud us? We have hitherto connived at the pilfering smuggling of thieves, but we should then, chastise the smuggling of robbers like the other actions of robbers. We have had indulgencies for you in the hours of friendship; do you think we should continue them in those of defiance?

If the Last and greatest of all the four calamities which your Congress foresees in imagination, namely, a national bankruptcy, should fall upon us, where would be your gain? Have you or your relations no fortunes in our funds to suffer by their ruin. If our revenues and credit should fall to the ground, who would defend you, as we did in the former wars against France and Spain? Who defend you against the deluge perhaps, of more Northern Nations, who might pour upon the distant Provinces of England, when she was unable to defend, them, as their ancestors did upon those of Imperial Rome? The languishing Provinces of Rome looked up in vain for help to a languishing head; that head could give them none; for, weakened by the disobedience and disaffection of the Provinces, she stood in need of protection for herself.

Instead then of listening to projects of war, or of suspension of commerce, assert your own reason in your own cause, and trust it not to the passions of others. We do not wonder, that with the vast Atlantic Ocean between you and us, to prevent a mutual communication of sentiments, mutual misapprehensions of the sentiments of each other