We wish we had no occasion to mention your complaints of the Statute which adjusted the limits and the Government of the Province of Quebec. It affected not your boundaries; for it contains a clause that it shall not affect the boundary of any other Colony. It gave the enjoyment of French laws to Frenchmen, who declared that they could not live without them. It gave toleration, that fairest flower of cultivated humanity, (as a Member of the House of Commons well expressed it,) to English subjects. It injured nobody. And we hope it pleased our God, though it pleased not your Congress. We marvel much, how that Congress has omitted to send one address to the inhabitants of Bengal, to rise in rebellion against us, because we have not conferred upon them all the honours of English liberty, which they are not asking; and another to their fellow-subjects in England, to reproach them for permitting the Gentoo religion to exist in that part of their Dominions.

We wish also, for the sake of private honour, which your Congress ought not to have lost sight of, even in the cause of the publick, that they had not deceived you, by converting a Statute passed in the time of the present Administration, for the security of your and our bulwarks, his Majesty's Ships and Dock-Yards, into a battery erected and levelled against American liberties. A short time before this Statute was passed, a great national calamity by a fire, which was suspected to be wilful, at Portsmouth, called for a new law, with new penalties, to prevent such disasters for the future. Capital punishment was inflicted by the Statute in question, upon those who should wilfully set on fire the King's Ships or Dock-Yards. Nobody was thinking of America at the time. England, or rather Portsmouth, and the other Naval Arsenals, engaged alone the attention of the publick. But the Statute in common form and common policy, was made to extend over all the Dominions of Britain; and the crime, like all other great crimes, was made punishable in Britain, although not committed within it. We ask you, if you can in your consciences believe, that this Statute was a contrivance framed on purpose to oppress you? And if you cannot, we ask you, what you must think of those men who would make you believe that it was?

From this review of the proceedings of Parliament relative to America, since the fourth of the King down to this day, we submit to the candour of American breasts, whether your Congress were in the right, in common charity, to convey an idea from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, that there had been a system formed and pursued in the present reign, to rob all America of all her liberties. Our own defence from so foul an aspersion, we have not mingled in reviewing these proceedings, with the interests of this or that party, of this or that Minister; interests, with all the little politicks and little posts depending on them, which we hold mighty cheap in comparison of our own great interests in the question that subsists between you and us, and not as they fancy, triflers as they are, between them and each other. We wish your Congress had observed the same conduct, and not disgraced, with the stale party strokes of this country, the great interests of their own. They would not in that case, have paid compliments to a Minister, who once said in full Parliament, that he would not permit even the hob nail of a horse's shoe to be made in America, at the expense of another Minister, who never had it in his power to do you either good or evil, except by a peace, which might have raised America to the skies, had not too many of her own sons pulled her down again.

Perhaps your Congress may think it wise to mingle the interests of America with those of party in this country, from a notion that you will be made sharers in the rewards of party victories, to which you contributed. But they are mistaken. Those who raise the whirlwind may not direct the storm. There are only three ways in this country by which any party can obtain that power at which every party aims; the favour of the Crown, the favour of Parliament, or the favour of the People. Do you think those men have a claim to the favour of the Crown, who, in the disputes between you and us, have endeavoured to pay compliments to the King's personal power at the expense of his authority, and to mark his reign with the loss of Dominions, which with so much glory he extended? Can they expect the esteem and confidence of Parliament, who have called in question its rights, denied its powers over its own Provinces, and who assert that a House of Representatives in America, in concurrence with the King, can do what the Houses of Lords and Commons, in concurrence with him, cannot do? Can they hope to please the People of England, who are pursuing measures which may lead to a civil war between England and her Colonies?

But even in their victory, where would be your gain? Whoever trusts to the gratitude of party, trusts to a support which, like a reed, has failed under all who ever rested upon it. Many of those who now make use of you as a weapon of party, to force themselves into power, would, as soon as they were in it, let you fall to the ground. We have a right to warn you of these things, because we have seen oppositions in this reign animate one part of the United Kingdoms against another; the people of England, the ancient supporters of Parliament, against Parliament; and the City of London, the ancient supporters of the House of Commons, against the House of Commons. It is your own fault, if, with such examples before your eyes, you permit America to be tilted against England, to gratify the ambition, or even the virtue, of any set of men upon earth. In the successes which you wish for, others will gain; but it is you who will be the losers: for the whole history of English party shows, that the men who trampled most on the Crown in the service of the people, trampled most on the people when in the service of the Crown; it being natural for them, in present obsequiousness, to hope for the oblivion of past provocations, and to go further than their neighbours in one way, because they had gone too far in the other. We need not call the example of Lord Strafford to your remembrance. There are men now living, who raised themselves to power by inveighing against Continental connections, and then half ruined their country to support them. Trust not then to the slender and broken reed of party; trust to your country; that country which has too often been deceived, but never deceives. Instead of being the tools of particular members of party, show them that they have been no more than your tools. Take the good which they have helped to procure for you, but avoid the mischiefs into which they would bring you.

While this Address was printing, an event has happened which may convince you who are your real friends or foes in this country. A fortnight ago, the Houses of Lords and Commons, in Addresses to the Throne, expressed their sentiments of the rebellious state of too many of your Provinces, but with all their wishes, to receive advances on your part to pacification, whenever they should be made in a constitutional manner. Those who call themselves your friends in Parliament, opposed even the last part of the Address, because they said it was deluding you with the idea of an accommodation which was not intended to be granted. But in order to carry that part of the Address into execution, and to convert the words of it into the measures which had been the objects of those words, a Resolution was within these few days proposed in the House of Commons, and adopted, which should express the intention of the House to levy no past, and impose no future Duties, as long as you should yourselves contribute to the expense to be incurred for your own publick service. By this Resolution, the danger so long dreaded by you, that Taxes in America would be converted into a Revenue for Britain, is removed. The Resolution, indeed, reserves a power in Parliament of imposing duties for the regulation of trade; a power which is absolutely necessary to be exerted for the interests of trade itself; but then, to prevent the abuse of this power, the produce of these duties is to go, not to the account of Great Britain, but to the exoneration of the provision made by the Colony for its own service. It is in your own power to make the security of America complete in all its parts; for if you desire that the quota to be furnished by you, for your service, shall not be arbitrary, but rise and fall with the quantum of the Land Tax, or of some of the great known taxes of England taken in cumulo; we do not think that your desire in that respect would be refused; and then it would be impossible for us to tax you without taxing ourselves at the same time, and in the same proportion. We will give praise where praise is due. The Minister who proposed this Resolution, could not fail to see two dangers to himself