enslave, your fellow-subjects in America, who feel that tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the Legislature, or by the bodies* who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects.

As to the means of, enforcing this thraldom, they are found to be as ridiculous and weak in practice, as they were unjust in principle. Indeed I cannot but feel, with the most anxious sensibility, for the situation of General Gage, and the Troops under his command, thinking him, as I do, a man of humanity and understanding, and entertaining, as I ever shall, the highest respect, the warmest love, for the British Troops. Their situation is truly unworthy—penned up—pining in inglorious inactivity. They are an army of impotence. You may call them an army of safety and of guard; but they are in truth an army of impotence and contempt; and to render the folly equal to the disgrace, they are an army of irritation and vexation.

But I find a report creeping abroad, that Ministers censure General Gage's inactivity. Let them censure him; it becomes them; it becomes their justice and their honour. I do not mean to censure his inactivity; it is a prudent and necessary inaction. But it is a miserable condition, where disgrace is prudence; and where it is necessary to be contemptible. This tameness, however disgraceful, cannot be censured for the first drop of blood shed in a civil and unnatural war, would be immedicabile vulmus. It would entail hatred and. contention between the two people, from generation to generation. Wo be to him who sheds the first, the unexpiable drop of blood in an impious war, with a people contending in the great cause of publick liberty. I will tell you plainly, my Lords, no son of mine, nor any one over whom I have influence, shall ever draw his sword upon his fellow-subjects.

I therefore urge and conjure your Lordships immediately to adopt this conciliating measure. I will pledge myself for its immediately producing conciliatory effects, from its being well-timed. But if you delay till your vain hope of triumphantly dictating the terms shall be accomplished, you delay forever. And even admitting that this hope, which in truth is desperate, should be accomplished, what will you gain by the imposition of your victorious amity? You will be untrusted and unthanked. Adopt then the grace, while you have the opportunity of reconcilement, or at least prepare the way; allay the ferment prevailing in America, by removing the obnoxious hostile cause—obnoxious and unserviceable; for their merit can be only inaction. "Non dimicare et vincere." Their victory can never he by exertions. Their force would be most disproportionately exerted against a brave, generous, and united people, with arms in their 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. And is the spirit of tyrannous 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 inflictions of the most oppressive and unexampled severity, beyond the accounts of history or the description of poetry? "Rhadamanthus habet durissima regna, castigatque AUDITQUE." So says the wisest poet, and perhaps the wisest statesman and politician. But the Bostonians have been condemned UNHEARD. The indiscriminating hand of vengeance has lumped together innocent and guilty; with all the formalities of hostility, has blocked up the Town, and reduced to beggary and famine thirty thousand inhabitants.

But his Majesty is advised that the union of America cannot last. Ministers have more eyes than I, and should have more ears; but from all the information I have been able to procure, I can pronounce it a union solid, permanent, and effectual. Ministers may satisfy themselves and delude the publick with the reports of what they call commercial bodies in America. They are not commercial. They are your packers and factors; they live upon nothing, for I call commission nothing; I mean the Ministerial AUTHORITY for their American intelligence—the runners of Government, who are paid for their intelligence. But these are not the men, nor this the influence to be considered in America, when we estimate the firmness of their union. Even to extend the question, and to take in the really mercantile circle, will be totally inadequate to the consideration. Trade, indeed, increases the wealth and glory of a country; but its real strength and stamina are to be looked for among the cultivators of the land. In their simplicity of life is found the simpleness of virtue—the integrity and courage of freedom. Those true genuine sons of the earth are invincible; and they surround and hem in the mercantile bodies, even if those bodies, which supposition I totally disclaim, could be supposed disaffected to the cause of liberty. Of this general spirit existing in the American Nation, (for so I wish to distinguish the real and genuine Americans from the pseudo traders I have described)—of this spirit of independence animating the Nation of America, I have the most authentick information. It is not new among them; it is and ever has been their established principle—their confirmed persuasion; it is their nature and their doctrine.

I remember some years ago when the repeal of the Stamp Act was in agitation, conversing in a friendly confidence with a person of undoubted respect and authenticity on this subject, and he assured me with a certainty which his judgment and opportunity gave him, that these were the prevalent and steady principles of America: that you might destroy their Towns, and cut them off from the superfluities, perhaps the conveniences of life, but that they were prepared to despise your power, and would not lament their loss, whilst they had—WHAT, my Lords? Their woods and their liberty. The name of my authority, if I am called upon, will authenticate the opinion irrefragably.*

If illegal violences have been, as it is said, committed in America, prepare the way, open a door of possibility for acknowledgment and satisfaction. But proceed not to such coercion, such proscription. Cease your indiscriminate inflictions; amerce not thirty thousand,—oppress not three millions, for the fault of forty or fifty. Such severity of injustice must forever render incurable the wounds you have already given your Colonies; you irritate them to unappeasable rancour. What though you march from Town to Town, and from Province to Province? Though you should be able to force a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit, how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress? To grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of Continent, populous in valour, liberty, and resistance?

This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen; it was obvious from the nature of things and of mankind; and above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed, and with success opposed, loans, benevolences, and ship money in England; the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and, by the Bill of Rights, vindicated the English Constitution; the same spirit which established the great fundamental and essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed, but by his own consent.

If your Lordships will turn to the politicks of those times, you will see the attempts of the Lords to poison this inestimable benefit of the Bill, by an insidious proviso; you will see their attempts defeated, in their conference with the Commons, by the decisive arguments of the ascertainers and maintainers of our liberty; you will see the thin, inconclusive, and fallacious stuff of those enemies to freedom, contrasted with the sound and solid reasoning of Serjeant Glanville and the rest, those great and learned men who adorned and enlightened this country, and placed her security on the summit of justice and freedom. And whilst I am on my legs, and thus do justice to the memory of those great men, I must also justify the merit of the living, by declaring my firm and fixed opinion, that such a man exists this day, [looking towards Lord Camden.]

This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty with liberty, to golden

*A favourite idea prevailed, and was often urged in argument by Administration, "that absolute passive obedience is duo to Acts of the " Legislature, which must not, in any case whatever, be questioned, "much less resisted by the people." Mr. Locke thought otherwise. But, in truth, it is at a point rather of practical policy. If, however, the postulatum were admitted in speculation, the inference will not reach from Westminster to Boston. It never was proved that our Lords Spiritual and Temporal had privilege in America, and that our Knights, Citizens, and Burgesses, were their Representatives.

*It was Doctor Franklin.