Britain, which, to give the argument its utmost force, he may call the Parent State, infatuated by the magnificence of her empty pomp, and mistaking the size of her sickly corpulence for vigorous strength, should rashly attempt the daring enterprise. Let him suppose her ships destined to guard those numerous ports, commodious for trade, to discharge their broadsides at boards and brickbats, to starve to submissions, and to hedge in commerce from the whole globe. Let him further suppose, and in sober seriousness if possible, her sending her hackneyed troops in partial drizzlings, from a peace establishment, by companies and regiments, to the amount of ten, fifteen, twenty, or it may be thirty thousand, with orders to pervade and traverse the Continent, compel subjections, secure the conquest, and to inflict on opposers the punishment due to treason and rebellion. I say, in such a supposed case, would not Americans, as indifferent spectators, view such operations as frantick, weak, and impracticable ? Would they hesitate in pronounching the man who projected it a subject for bedlam, the nation who adopted it strangely bewildered and consigned to destruction, and the tools who were to execute it prisoners of war and victims for slaughter? or the people of the Continent little pigmies, food for cranes, or great poltroons, fit only for slaves and vassals ? Otherwise, Could success possibly attend them, or conquest ultimately await them ? Let the inhabitants of such a Continent only secure their own locks, their natural advantages, and they could break to pieces the brittle lines of a marching camp. The perfidious Philistines could never bind them, nor the soft persuasions of the treacherous Delilahs in their own bosoms long deceive them. Britain, in the attempt, might possibly be crushed beneath the falling weight of her massy pillars, with her lords and her nobles; but the Continent would survive the shock unhurt.

That the above is justly descriptive of the American situation, however astonishing to the unthinking and timorous, is certainly true. Her numerous harbours, framed by nature and improved by art, can never be blocked up by a British navy. Our own fleets may soon be their equal match Our trade, which is a jewel, a precious prize that every commercial State must wish to acquire, cannot long he much obstructed by cutters and tenders. It may rather command respect. The alliances and the fleets of every power in Europe, the British ships may, for a time, harass, plague, injure, and distress, but America must, at last, rise superior to all her arts to deceive and exertions to subdue; and the day which crowns our liberty, if obtained by the point of the sword, must seal Britain’s melancholy doom to an eternal duration. These prostituted maidens of the sea may sputter and spit their fiery venom on the borders of the ocean; they cannot, like the Trojan horse, enter our inland Towns, and from their bellies pour out armed battalions. Possibly we must abandon some of our commercial Cities to their relentless rage, and invite our retiring friends to exchange the benefits of commerce for the tillage of the earth, and to embrace in its stead the bosom of cultivation, until innocency and liberty shall rise supremely triumphant, and the tide of ministerial corruption cease to flow.

An army of twenty thousand may undoubtedly secure themselves on islands and peninsulas, by intrenchments, ships, and batteries, both floating and permanent. They cannot force American lines defended by numbers, resolution, and bravery. But admitting they should, and attempt to penetrate the country, fortified as it is by a continued succession of hills, valleys, rocks, swamps, rivers, fences, walls, trees, and woods, which are so many natural ramparts, breastworks, and redoubts; these will constantly defend our militia from the fire of the enemy, and as constantly embarrass and impede their march, tied up as they are to the regular pomp and trappings of war. Such a wild profusion of rustick intrenchments, as are the appendages of every farm, pass, and road, are commodious for sallies, retreats, and seasonable succours. They are the revival of antiquity, the defences of the ancient warriors of the world, which consisted in fences made of the trunks and the branches of trees, of unformed heaps of earth, and walls of stone. Behind these they secured themselves against the attack of their foes, and used their own weapons with security and success. Regular invaders must penetrate suck a country with prodigious loss, being incessantly exposed to a surrounding fire of concealed promiscuous detachments, parties that are flanking, and formidable bodies in their front and their rear. Being constantly dogged, galled, and annoyed, they must be frequently decoyed or drove into ambuscades, until they are enfeebled and wasted away. In the beautiful phraseology of the Eastern dialect, “The stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it. Wo to him that buildeth a Town with blood, and establisheth a City by iniquity! Behold, is it not of the Lord of Hosts that the people shall labour in the very fire, and weary themselves for very vanity?” Habakkuk, chap, ii, v. 11. Surely ruin must await them from every quarter, and destruction spring out of every corner. In the arts of the bush, and a skirmishing fight, we stand unrivalled. As is said of the natives, we may approach like the fox, fly like the bird, and fight like the Numidian wolf or Getulian lion.

Let us again put probability upon the rack, and suppose their forces augmented to a number sufficient for traversing the Continent, with destruction stalking by their side, ravaging, wasting, and destroying as they march. Can they garrison the places through which they pass, and occupy a progress of eighteen hundred miles? Can they stretch, in their advances, from the North to the South, and sweep, by their ranks, from the Atlantick to the seas of the West? Will not the Americans, wronged and insulted, oppressed and plundered as they are, fill in after them, start up in every corner, hill, and valley, and gather fresh strength from increased opposition? Having inarched from one end of the Continent to the other, from Nova-Scotia to Georgia, and from Georgia to Nova-Scotia, the same route will still remain. Like a vibrating pendulum, in the open air, they will leave no traces of a conquest behind them. The annual increase of sixty thousand will more than supply the posts of our slain; and industry, frugality, and economy, will fully compensate their ravages and depredations; and, as our resources are permanent and internal, we can endure the struggle for ages. To give them the least prospect of a conquest, they should have potent armies at once operating in an hundred different places, which is, happily, out of their power. This is no theoretical fiction; it is founded on recent experience, and the sagacious policy of one of the brightest luminaries of the age, Pitt, (whose praises are with all nations, and will be resounded to latest ages,) in the last war, being sensible that a single effort, carried on against the extended territory of the single Province of Canada, could never bring the enemy to a subjection. He therefore planned his measures to attack the French in several different parts at the same time, in all their places of strength. Accordingly expeditions went on. General Amherst, with a body of twelve thousand men, was to attack Crown Point; General Wolfe was at the opposite quarter, to enter the River St, Lawrence, and undertake the siege of Quebeck, the capital of the French-American Dominions; while General Pridecmx and Sir William Johnson were to attempt a fort near the cataract of Niagara, &c., &c.

Much has been said, more might be said, on the spirit and temper of the Americans; we might minutely trace it, in its causes, qualities, and consequences. But, in tenderness to the patience of the reader, I must deny myself the pleasure of expatiating on this copious and animating subject. Suffice it to say, that the mind of the American has been gradually forming to its present tenor. By a constant succession of innovated oppressions and innovating measures, he has been roused to reflection. By one complex idea, he has connected liberty, religion, and happiness, in one mutual and indissoluble bond. He has seen with a forbearing spirit the one and the other of these repeatedly struck at by usurpation and corruption. Increasing oppressions, which have made his blood occasionally swell high in his veins, have at length hardened doubt into a determined resolution. He has traced ministerial manoeuvres, in all their various windings and future consequences; he could see nothing but the horrors of servitude attendant on a resignation. The pitiful exertions of the Court, when seated as judge in its own case; denouncing destruction to this and the neighbouring Colonies, by the Port, Regulating, Murder, and Fish Bills, filled his heart to its full dimensions. While, from musing on these things, the sacred fire burnt within, the battle of Lexington