are not worth thinking of, because you may confine yourselves and them to your houses in cold weather, and as you are to export nothing, the summer season will afford you time amply sufficient to raise provisions for your own use, and to lay in fuel for the winter. It is true your stocks may suffer a little in the winter, but this inconvenience may be remedied, in a great measure, by providing such large quantities of provender for them in the summer as to suffer it to be exposed to them to go to, whenever they please, in weather too cold for naked men to distribute it to them. Elegancies, and even luxuries, which many of you, by having been long accustomed to, now consider as the conveniences, if not the necessaries of life, may be resigned as baubles, beneath the consideration of men who either desire or deserve to be free. The ladies, indeed, will be subjected to many disagreeable hardships, but their generous souls will submit to every inconvenience rather than see their posterity enslaved; and the great leisure you will have from contracting the cultivation of your lands will enable you to extend your manufactures till you can supply yourselves with every convenience, with every elegance, that rational men can desire. But till you can greatly improve your present manufactures, you will allow, my countrymen, that your situations will be rather uncomfortable. Are you certain that all America will cheerfully submit to this situation? Did those who signed the Association in the days of the Stamp Act, religiously adhere to it? That there are some f w refined souls in every Colony, perhaps in every county of each Colony, that will sacrifice their own private interest, subject themselves to every inconvenience, and deny themselves almost the common necessaries of life, to promote the publick good and to preserve the liberties of their country, I have no doubt; because history furnishes instances that such disinterested, such heroick characters, have existed, and I believe the inhabitants of America are possessed of as much virtue as those of other Nations; but to imagine that all, or even a majority, of the inhabitants of a country, are possessed of such exalted ideas of patriotism, is a romantick supposition, which never has, nor I fear, never will be warranted by the history of any Nation whatever. Nor can we flatter ourselves that this angelick exertion of virtue will be general in America when we consider that many of her present inhabitants are, like birds of passage, settled only for a time, for the purposes of raising fortunes by trade, whose ultimate view is to return, with the fortunes they acquire, to the connections they have left behind them in Britain, and that there are others whose daily bread depends upon the continuance of the laws we complain of. These two sets of men, so far from observing such an Association, will use every artifice to evade it themselves, and try every stratagem to tempt the vain, to deceive the unwary, and to prevail upon the lukewarm, to desert the common cause; and a general defection from the plan, when once adopted, can answer no other end than that of rendering you contemptible.

But even supposing that all America should unite, as one man, in attempting this measure, the British aristocracy will never suffer you to carry it into execution; for, let it be remembered, that one of the rights they claim is that of restraining your manufactures; and when you openly avow a design of purchasing no more of their manufactures they will immediately enforce that right of restraining you from making any of your own. But, surely, say the proposers of this plan, they cannot force us to purchase from them whether we will or not. Very true; but if you refuse to do so they will endeavour to prevent you from purchasing those articles in any other market, and from making them yourselves. But, say the proposed of this plan, they have no right to do this. Very true; nor have they any right to make any kind of laws to govern you. But they will endeavour to shew you that they have the power of doing it; and though right and power are two distinct things, you may as well acknowledge the right, as to submit to the power, of legislation; and if you submit to the laws already made, you will soon have others, equally arbitrary, imposed upon you for restraining your manufactures. For my own part, I shall not be at all surprised if the very next session should furnish us with Acts of Parliament enacting, "that your smiths' shops shall be destroyed as nuisances; tanning your own hides be declared a misdemeanor; combing your own wool be punished with fine and imprisonment; spinning your own flax subject you to the pillory; making your own shoes be made felony, without benefit of clergy; fabricating your own hats incur a premunire; weaving any kind of cloth be deemed an overt act of high treason; fashioning a canoe be chastised as an insult upon the British flag; building a boat be constituted an unpardonable act of rebellion; launching a ship be considered as an actual declaration of war; trials by juries be exploded, as dangerous appeals to the people, who are not to be trusted; new Courts of Admiralty be erected in their room, whose judges shall hold their commissions during pleasure, and be stimulated to enforce those Acts, by sharing in the forfeitures and confiscations occasioned by their own judgments; and to extinguish every spark of publick spirit, and to prevent a possibility of redress, your Assemblies will be dissolved, and the people no longer permitted to elect Representatives, to urge their grievances, or to utter their complaints." Do not, my countrymen, be so blind to your own welfare, as to imagine I am jesting upon this serious occasion, or that I am supposing Acts of Parliament which can never exist. Reflect upon the different Acts for preventing slitting mills; for erecting Courts of Admiralty for recovering the inland forfeitures imposed by the Stamp Act; for suspending the Legislature of New-York; for shutting up the port of Boston; for altering the Charter of New England, which was more solemnly granted by Majesty than their own Magna Charta; for screening the murtherers of the Americans; and the joint address, from both Houses of Parliament to his Majesty, to transport the Americans themselves, to be imprisoned and ruined, if not butchered in England; and you will be convinced that the cases I have supposed are by no means chimerical, and that there is no act of intemperance, injustice, or despotism, which the British aristocracy will not attempt, to restrain America from manufacturing, the moment you declare your intention of doing so. To enter, therefore, into Associations against importing British manufactures, any farther than a rational attention to your circumstances, is surely no moderate measure, but must, at last, end in a humiliating submission, or oblige you to have recourse to that force which the proposers of this plan wish to avoid.

Let us now consider whether an Association against exporting your commodities would not be attended with still worse consequences. This plan, if it mean any thing, is to distress Great Britain. But surely you cannot more effectually do this, than by lessening your imports, and increasing your exports, as much as possible; for by selling your commodities to the British merchants, and by taking none of theirs in exchange, you will increase your own wealth by exhausting that of Britain. But it is objected, we are at present largely indebted to the British Merchants. The more incumbent it is upon you to export all the commodities you can, to pay them as soon as possible; for you ought to have more gratitude than to attempt to ruin the families of those who have been kind enough to furnish you not only with the elegancies, but the necessaries of life. Common honesty requires that you should pay your debts, and if you should refuse to do so, not only the persons injured, but all mankind, will judge unfavourably of you, and declare, that instead of bravely contending for your liberties, you are knavishly endeavouring to cheat your creditors. Such a national breach of faith will unite all Europe against you, as a flagitious race of mortals, who do not deserve to be free; who ought to be considered as the pests of human society, and as such, forced into submission, if not extirpated.

For God's sake, my countrymen, let your conduct be such that you shall be thought worthy of that freedom you contend for, and do not render yourselves the objects of contempt and abhorrence; for if you should even establish your liberty, in opposition to the united efforts of all Europe to reduce you, it may never be in your power to manifest your honest intentions of making retribution. Many of you and your creditors may be dead before the dispute is decided, and the very withholding the sums you owe, for a short period, from men in trade, may irretrievably reduce the survivors and their families to rum, and American become as proverbially infamous as punic faith.