This gentleman has too much honour to be guilty of so ungenerous an act, and fortunately for him his reputation is too well established to be impaired by your feeble darts. I challenge you to find a man of more integrity throughout all your democracy. Are you not then ashamed to declare these dissensions are only encouraged by a few interested persons, who take a malignant pleasure in exciting discords?

Let me address myself to one of you who is a member of that honourable community, which he has most daringly and impudently insulted by subscribing his name to that calumniating letter. Let me call upon him to erase his name from amongst you as a small atonement for the unpardonable insinuations he has thrown out against his brethren. He has publickly attacked them, and publickly charged them with taking a malignant pleasure in exciting discords and dissensions, and has dared to assert that this state is founded on the strictest truth; what a strange perversion !

You, gentlemen, have the confidence to declare, that your Committee have not found the least difficulty in carrying into execution any one Resolution of the Continental Congress. If this be true, I have, I confess, been strangely deceived. Let us inquire into this matter. Do not the Congress bind themselves by the sacred ties of virtue, honour, and love of liberty, that no advantage shall be taken of the non-importation, but that goods shall be sold as they have been for the last twelve months? Have not the dry-goods Merchants, without the least opposition, generally broke through this agreement, and is not your Committee apprized of it? Have they not made inquiry into the prices of various articles, and did they not find the Merchants had advanced the prices on some goods twenty-five, on others fifty, seventy-five, nay! one hundred per cent., and did not the Committee acquiesce in this? These facts are too stubborn for you to controvert; the reasons were obvious; the Resolve was too tyrannical to be borne; it better suited the slaves of Russia than the freemen of America. As a Committee you knew this, and you knew you dare not attempt to enforce it; and as some on your Committee were in the dry-goods trade, it was your interest, and you thought it too your duty, to pass it over. How then can you declare, and palm your declaration on the publick as the strictest truth, that the Committee have met with no difficulty in carrying into execution any one Resolution of the Congress? Do not the Congress bind themselves by the same sacred ties to encourage frugality and economy, and to discourage every species of dissipation and extravagance?

Are not the Assemblies continued in your City as usual, under your own immediate notice, and is not your interdum Secretary officious therein? Did your Committee find no difficulty in carrying into execution what you had foolishly resolved was the sense of the Congress respecting Sheep? Yes. You disgraced yourselves by your scandalous conduct; you invaded private property, and some of your body committed daring robberies in the face of the day, and in the sight of the whole world. You forced people to carry their own goods on their backs to the Jail of your City; you intimidated a helpless old woman for no other offence than innocently offering her goods for sale, and would have obliged her to take the same measures you had forced others to before, without law, without justice, reason, or mercy, had not a Magistrate, whose presence and commands struck terrour into your dastardly souls, rescued her and her property from your domineering threats. Here, too, I might touch on the article of Tea, and tell of the clemency and mercy of some of your monsters relative to importations of this baneful weed, but it is an affair of too nice delicacy, we will not take up its ashes.

Yet you have declared your Committee have met with no difficulty in carrying into execution any one Resolution of the Continental Congress. I tell you this assertion is an imposition on the people of this Province. Perhaps you call this novel species of procedure rather a pleasure than a difficulty. I believe it; so fond are you of power, and so impatient of bearing rule, that at some rate or other you are determined on the possession of it; and while you rest secure in the idea of enforcing your mandates by a lawless mob, you no doubt glory in the acquisition of your usurpation.

Some of you, though active in the most atrocious violences, by artifice, would persuade the world that these proceedings have not been done by the Committee as a body; but if individuals of you will repeatedly commit such extraordinary depredations on the property of your countrymen, in defiance of all laws, why do ye not discharge them? Why do ye not publish your disapprobation of their proceedings? Why not demand an acknowledgment of their errours? Instead of this, you tacitly applaud them; appoint them to new offices; and while you thus tamely acquiesce, you are parties in the guilt, and deserve the severest reprehension.

You tell us the number of dissentients with you are very small. You are strangely deluded. If you had made the necessary inquiry, you would have found their numbers were great, and by far the most respectable of the community. They do not consist of the noisy, blustering and bellowing patriots, but the cool, deliberate, and thinking men, renowned for probity, integrity, and honour, unlike your Adams, Hancock, and your Lee.

The inhabitants of your Province have too much good sense to consider the least infraction of the proceedings of the Continental Congress as productive of their political ruin. The more sensible part are shocked at many of their Resolves. They consider a compliance with them as likely to overwhelm all America with destruction; they look upon them as setting up a total independence of the parent state, and consider the leaders of the present measures as leaders of a rebellion and faction, which portend the most miserable calamities.

The disputes between the State and its Members, at the meeting of the Congress, were easily adjusted. They had not arrived to such an alarming length as to throw us into a state of despair. Many able and prudent writers among us, as well as you, recommend the adoption of moderation and temper. Your Farmer, your versatile Farmer, was one of this number. He did not know on which side the balance would preponderate; he played the Vicar’s part; he was Jack on both sides; he waited the event of the farce; violence rose victorious; he embraced her cause, and in derision of the reputation he had acquired by his former Letters, he parted with it to gain fresh laurels. But the doctrines he had advanced formerly, very much cramped his soaring genius. He could not form his new edifice with grandeur, without demolishing his old fabrick, and in his attempt to form a fresh wreath, his old one decayed, and his new was blasted. The fast friends to our constitutional liberties pointed out, and laboured hard for a firm and dutiful Petition, and a spirited, but decent Remonstrance, as the most probable means of establishing peace and harmony. They warmly recommended the drawing a rational line of Parliamentary jurisdiction and American allegiance, on the principles of the British Constitution. How a conduct like this would in all human probability have terminated, I leave to your own candour, though you seem to be divested of the smallest share. We find, from every account, his most gracious Majesty (warmly attached to the interest of all his subjects, however remote) is ready to hear our prayers. Every friend to America in England urged us to moderation; and had their advice been regarded, the unnatural dispute ere this day, might have been brought to the most happy issue. The advocates for these wise and moderate measures daily meet with the grossest insults and abuse from every paltry Republican pen, to whose inconsistent jargon your partial Presses were ever free and easy of admission; and while the independent Incendiary, now known throughout America by the name of the “lean and grinning Cassius,” found the most inviting access for his Incubrations, wisdom, prudence, and reason were excluded an audience. Your papers were kept under an undue influence, and filled with fabricated letters and paragraphs, culled from every fiery publication, to alarm and inflame. These are truths which can be solidly supported, and if you will revert to the papers of that period you will not deny. One of your Printers, of your true Republican cast, published the most vile and treasonable performance that was ever exhibited to the world, and this same Printer rejected a moderate and pertinent reply. Another of your weak and blustering Printers stands impeached for a forgery, and there is great reason to believe he continues in the same practice. This same Printer, as a reward for his exhibition of scandal, was by your society of pedagogues, made a