the very being of the Constitution makes it necessary; and whatever is necessary to the publick safety must be just.

The present conspirators against the happiness of mankind ought to know that no subterfuges, no knavish subtilties, no evasions, no combinations, nor pretended commissions, shall be able to screen or protect them from publick justice. They ought to know that the PEOPLE can follow them through all their labyrinths and doubling meanders; a power confined by no limitations but of publick justice and the publick good; a power that does not always follow precedents, but makes them; a power which has this for its principle, that extraordinary and unprecedented villanies ought to have extraordinary and unprecedented punishments.

To the Officers, Soldiers, and Seamen, who may be employed to butcher their Relations, Friends, and Fellow-Subjects in AMERICA.

You can neither be ignorant of, nor unacquainted with, the arbitrary steps that the present King, supported by an abandoned Ministry, a venal set of prostituted Lords and Commons, is now pursuing to overturn the sacred Constitution of the British Empire, which he had sworn to preserve.

You are not, or will not long be ignorant, that the King, the Lords and Commons, have (to satiate their revenge against a few individuals) declared the whole people of America to be in a state of rebellion, only because they have avowed their resolution to support their Charters, Rights, and Liberties against the secret machinations of designing men; who would destroy them, and you are fixed upon as the instruments of their destruction. However, I entertain too good an opinion of you, to believe there is one true Englishman who will undertake the bloody work. Men without fortunes, principles, or connexions, may indeed handle their arms in any desperate cause, to oblige a tyrant or monster in human shape; but men of family or fortune, or of honest principles, I hope could never be prevailed upon to sheath their swords in the bowels of their countrymen. Englishmen surely cannot be found to execute so diabolical a deed, to imbrue their hands in innocent blood, and fight against their friends and Country; actions which must brand them with perpetual marks of reproach and infamy.

O my countrymen, let neither private interest nor friendship, neither relations nor connexions, prevail with or induce you to obey (as you must answer at the last day before the awful Judge of the world for the blood that will be wantonly and cruelly spilt) the murderous orders of an inhuman tyrant; who, to gratify his lust of power, would lay waste the world. No, rather enter into a solemn league, and join with the rest of your countrymen, to oppose the present measures of Government, planned for our ruin.

When your Country calls, then stand forth and defend the cause of liberty, despise the degeneracy of the age, the venality of the times, and hand freedom down to posterity, that your children may smile and bless, not curse your warlike resolution. To die gloriously fighting for the Laws and Liberties of your Country, is honourable, and would deserve a crown of martyrdom; to die fighting against it is infamy, and you would forever deserve the heaviest curses and execrations.

I hope neither you nor the Irish have forgot the shameful insults you have received from the King ever since the conclusion of the last war; you have been despised, neglected, and treated with contempt, while a parcel of beggarly Scotchmen only have been put into places of profit and trust, in the East and West-Indies, in England and America, and the preference has, of honour and promotions, been constantly given to those people; nay! even to rebels, and some who have served in the French service. Be assured if you can be prevailed upon to butcher or enslave your fellow-subjects, and to set up an arbitrary power on the ruins of publick liberty, that your substance would soon be reduced to the miserable pittance of Foreign Troops; and you, with the surviving subjects of England and America, be reduced to the miserable condition of being ruled by an army of Scotch Janizaries, assisted by Roman Catholicks.

Let every English and Irish Officer, Soldier, and Seaman, seriously weigh these things, and then, if they are valiant, courageous, magnanimous, and free, like their forefathers; if they are true to their King and their Country; if they value their religion, laws, lives, liberties, families, and posterity, no consideration can prevail with them to engage against the Americans in an inhuman, bloody civil war.

Let every man, then, who is really and truly a Protestant, who wishes well to his Country and the rights of mankind, lay aside his prejudices and consider the cause of America, and her success in this struggle for freedom, as a thing of the last consequence to England, upon which our salvation depends; for the present plan of Royal despotism is a plan of general ruin. I say, let us all speedily unite, and endeavour to defend them from their open, and ourselves from our own secret and domestick enemies; and if any are lukewarm in this great publick cause, and at this time of imminent danger, let them be made an example of treachery and cowardice, that the present generation may detest and abhor them, and posterity exclaim against and curse them, as unnatural monsters, who would destroy the human race.

THE CRISIS.—NO. V.

To the People:

At a juncture like the present, when the National reputation of Britain, as well as her absolute safety, stands tottering on the brink of destruction; when Liberty and Freedom, the great pillars of the Constitution, are, by force and fraud, undermined, and tumbling into ruins; when the bloody sword of tyranny is drawn against America, and soon to be plunged into the bowels of her innocent inhabitants; when the present Sovereign, aided by a despicable junto, the rebel, outcast, and refuse of Scotland, and a Parliament not returned by the free suffrages of the People, are rioting with impunity in the spoils of an insulted powerful Kingdom; when they, by cruel oppression, have spread terrour and civil war in every part of the British Empire; when they have destroyed or suspended her trade, and sapped the credit of publick security; when the most iniquitous and unjust Laws are daily passed to curb the spirit, and bind in chains the hands of a brave and free People; when St. James’s is made the slaughter-house of America; when the Sovereign has become a National Executioner, and for a sceptre carries a bloody knife; when, by a most scandalous and shameful profusion of the publick money, we are hourly robbed and plundered to answer all the purposes of kingcraft and villany; when new Taxes are daily imposed upon the People in time of peace, to the almost entire ruin of the State; when the minions of despotism are increasing the Land Forces, for the open and avowed purpose of wading knee-deep in blood through the Liberties of Britain; when the Protestant Religion is openly subverted, and the British subjects in Canada deprived of those great securities of their personal liberty and property—the Habeas Corpus Act, and Trial by Juries; when a suspending and dispensing power is assumed by the Crown; when opposition to the most cruel and wanton acts of lawless power is deemed Rebellion; when the Senators, designed as the protectors of the People, are become their destroyers; when the appointed guardians of publick freedom are become base apostates and conspirators against the Liberties of mankind; when neither oaths nor conscience can bind the Sovereign or his Ministers; when both publick and private justice is denied to a subject, nay, to the whole body of the People at large; when our lives are exposed to false accusations, and our persons to arbitrary imprisonment and heavy fines; when the Judges before whom we are to stand upon life and death, and before whom all cases concerning liberty and property must be brought, are too much devoted to the will and pleasure of the Crown, and enemies to the natural rights of mankind; when Juries, who are to decide our fate, are packed, bribed, or modeled to the pernicious designs of a wicked and detestable Ministry; when every post, Civil, Naval, and Military, is filled by Northern flatterers and their adherents, by men of no principles, by parasites, pimps, catmites, and the advocates for arbitrary power; when the People can see nothing but misery and slavery before their eyes; when this vast and mighty Empire, the admiration and envy of