in town. The reason is obvious to me. The Minister clearly perceives if men were acquainted with the real state of things in America; if they had time to acquire information, to reason and reflect, that all men of generous feelings would leave him, and even his most desperate followers might be shaken. Men are to be brought to this black business hoodwinked; they are to be drawn in by degrees, till they cannot retreat. On the one hand, a dutiful address to his Majesty, full of those general assurances of loyalty and respect becoming subjects to the first magistrate, is offered to your determination: on the other, a hasty approbation of measures you have had no time to consider, from men you have every reason to suspect, lies before you. Is there a man who feels the dignity of his situation, that can hesitate in his choice upon such an alternative?

I shall now expose to the House the false facts which are assumed in his Majesty’s speech, as composed by the Minister. First, the Minister tells you he has called you early together. This I deny. The commencement of open hostilities was in April, the battle of Bunker’s Hill in June, and the Petition from the Congress in July. They severally arrived in England within five or six weeks after the events. Now, I maintain, as a member of Parliament, intrusted with a voice in the supreme authority of the empire, that I am called late to deliberate in the national council on such great events. The next notorious untruth is, that the Americans are collecting a naval force. The third assertion, that the Americans meant only to amuse by vague expressions of attachment to the parent state, is equally injurious to their honour and to truth. This can only be inserted as an excuse for the bad conduct of Administration and their ill success. The Americans told you, in language the most direct and simple, again and again repeated, that they would resist to the last appeal those arbitrary innovations, but you affected not to believe them; nevertheless, I maintain, the armaments were calculated to resist men in arms, and the insufficiency arose from a total ignorance of the force, character, and dispositions of the people in America, as well as a misconception upon the effect the several restraining bills passed last session would produce; in short, from a perfect ignorance of the operations of cruelty and oppression on high-minded men, acting under the spirit of freedom. All their knowledge seems to have been drawn from one source, that of Governour Hutchinson. The civil war now raging in America seems, step by step, to have been carried on by his advice. Whoever reads his letters lately published in America, sees every measure pursued by Administration to have been antecedently pointed out by this gentleman in his confidential correspondence, until his sentiments seem dictated at last more by revenge and disappointment than any other principle. What confidence should be placed in the advice of a man who has declared, in the cool moments of committing his reflections to paper, that every Machiavelian policy is now to be vindicated towards the people in America? I am here supposing the letters in my hand to be genuine; and there is little reason to doubt their authenticity, as they remain uncontradicted. It matters not to me, as a judge, how they were procured. The only question respecting my opinion on the conduct of Mr. Hutchinson at present is, are the letters genuine or not? For in this I always differed from the Lords of the Council, who determined on the complaint of the Province of New-England against Governour Hutchinson, on the former letters they discovered. The Lords of the Council laid the whole stress on the manner in which the letters had been obtained. No man could admire the abilities of the advocate more than I did on that occasion; it was his business to inflame the passions, to cover the turpitude of Governour Hutchinson’s conduct; under crimes of a greater dye: but it was shameful in the judges to be led away, it was unworthy the discrimination so necessary to that character, to mingle the manner of obtaining the letters with the fact they were brought to prove. I shall suppose the letters had been obtained as infamously as the Essay on Woman, and more infamously it is impossible; yet my judgment on the conduct of a Governour, writing to men in high authority on the political affairs of his Province, and concluding as his advice that the liberty of British subjects must be abridged, would not have been altered from that circumstance. And here I must avow my sentiments as freely as Governour Hutchinson has communicated his, that any officer in Government, much less the supreme magistrate, entrusted with the preservation of the rights of every individual in his Province, who could entertain such sentiments, is unfit to be employed in any office, civil or military, after a fact of so heinous a nature against the Constitution being fully proved. I am confident our ancestors, instead of giving such a man an enormous pension, would have inflicted the punishment he deserved, which I think should have been an address to the Crown, that he might never more have been employed in the service of the publick.

I know there are many men, high in favour, who are for abridging the liberties of the people in the Colonies. My system, on the contrary, is for preserving them sacred and inviolate, according to their several ancient institutions, the variety of which forms the harmony and beauty of the whole. There is no middle institution, as in this country, to balance between the People and the Crown: the Assemblies are their only barrier; they are, therefore, the favourite institution of the people; to them they look for protection against the exactions, oppressions, and extortions of Governors, and are, on that account, cautious and jealous of any infringement that shall diminish their power. The honourable gentleman who seconded this Address has been long employed as his Majesty’s representative in the Colonies, first in Carolina, and lastly in Jamaica. Everything he offers to this House must derive great weight from these circumstances; his abilities are undisputed. I have not the honour of knowing him; but I have heard his talents universally acknowledged. Having been on the spot in some places, it must give him many additional advantages, for I maintain it is impossible for any man who has not seen with his own eyes, and heard with his own ears, to know equally well the manners, customs, dispositions, and other circumstances necessary to form a true judgment on the present contest with the Colonies; but it is also necessary to know some leading circumstances respecting the person who offers his information and advice, before we hastily concur in his opinion. The honourable gentleman says: “It may appear strange, that he who has grown grey in the service of America, should now appear among the first to propose those coercive measures which, by some, are termed cruel and harsh;” but this he excuses from his humanity. I say, it may appear strange to some who are not acquainted with the history of that gentleman’s administration so well as I, that he should take this forward part. But here I premise, that I do not enter into the merit of the dispute which that gentleman had with the Assembly of Jamaica, because it is beyond my present argument; all I assert is, that he had an unfortunate dispute with that body, which lasted two years; that during this period they would do no business with him, or raise any money; that he dissolved the Assembly more than once, and still a great majority were found against his measures; that he was at last recalled, and a successor appointed, who cancelled his proceedings, upon one of the most unfortunate representations that ever attended any man on leaving his Government. I am, therefore, not surprised that the honourable gentleman should be inimicable to American Assemblies, or that he should be ready to join with those who have found out a shorter way of governing them than by the general sense of the people, seeing they are so troublesome, on many occasions, to the repose of a Governour.

The honourable gentleman has given us some account of the debilitated state of men in the other Provinces he had the honour to command, and hinted at means for subduing their spirit, in a manner which inclines me to believe he has not left many more friends behind in that Colony than in Jamaica. Administration has been so much misled by those partial and illiberal accounts of men in the gross, that I dare say they will be cautious how they trust to such intelligence again. Neither my reading or observation give me leave to think the people in Carolina will be behind any of the Colonies in supporting and defending rights which are so essential to securing everything that is dear to them as British subjects. The honourable gentleman had occasion to lead them to war on a certain occasion; I wish he would tell the House how they behaved. If Southern climate has such strange effects in enervating the human frame, give me leave to hope at least that the honourable gentleman has escaped this contagion. The. other scheme he alludes to—of calling forth the slaves—is too black and horrid to be