valor of your troops. I know the skill of your officers. But on this ground, I am one who will lift up my hands against it. In such a cause, even your success would be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man. She would embrace the pillars of the State, and pull down the Constitution along with her. Is this your boasted peace? To sheathe the sword, not in its scabbard, but in the bowels of your countrymen?

The Americans have been wronged. They have been driven to madness by injustice. Will you punish them for the madness you have occasioned? Rather let prudence and temper come first from this side! I will undertake for America that she will follow the example.

"Be to her faults a little blind;

Be to her virtues very kind."

Let the Stamp Act be repealed; and let the reason for the repeal because the Act was founded on an erroneous principle-be assigned. Let it be repealed absolutely, totally, and immediately! FROM CHATHAM.

XXXVI.-RECONCILIATION WITH AMERICA.

AMERICA, my lords, can not be reconciled to this country, she ought not to be reconciled, till the troops of Britain are withdrawn. How can America trust you, with the bayonet at her breast? How can she suppose that you mean less than bondage or death? The way must be immediately opened for reconciliation. It will soon be too late. An hour, now lost in allaying ferments in America, may produce years of calamity. Never will I desert, for a moment, the conduct of this weighty business. Unless nailed to my bed by the extremity of sickness, I will pursue it to the end. I will knock at the door of this sleeping and confounded ministry, and will, if it be possible, rouse them to a sense of their danger.

I contend not for indulgence, but for justice, to America. What is our right to persist in such cruel and vindictivę acts against a loyal, respectable people? They say you

have no right to tax them without their consent. They say truly. Representation and taxation must go together. They are inseparable. I therefore urge and conjure your lordships immediately to adopt this conciliating measure. If illegal violences have been, as is said, committed in America, prepare the way, open the door of possibility, for acknowledgment and satisfaction. But proceed not to such coercion, such proscription. Cease your indiscriminate inflictions. Amerce not thirty thousand. Oppress not three millions; irritate them not to unappeasable rancor, for the fault of forty or fifty.

Such severity of injustice must forever render incurable the wounds you have inflicted. What though you march from town to town, from province to province! What though you enforce a temporary and local submission! How shall you secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress? How grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, strong in valor, liberty, and the means of resistance?

The spirit which now resists your taxation, in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolence, and ship-money, in England; the same spirit which aroused all England, and, by the Bill of Rights, vindicated the English Constitution; the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. This glorious spirit animates three millions in America, who prefer poverty, with liberty, to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defense of their rights as men, as freemen.

What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame glowing in the breast ef every Whig in England? "Tis liberty to liberty engaged," that they will defend themselves, their families, and their country. In this great cause they are immovably allied. It is the alliance of God and nature; immutable, eternal; fixed as the firmament of Heaven. FROM CHATHAM.

XXXVII.-ON AN ADDRESS TO THE KING.-No. I.

THIS and the following extract, may be spoken separately or together.

I MOST cheerfully agree with the first portion of the address moved by the noble lord. I would even go and prostrate myself at the foot of the throne, were it necessary, to testify my joy at any event, which may promise to add to the domestic felicity of my sovereign; at any thing, which may seem to give a further security to the permanent enjoyment of the religious and civil rights of my fellowsubjects. But while I do this, I must, also, express my strongest disapprobation of the address, and the fatal measures which it approves.

It has been customary for the king, on similar occasions, not to lead parliament, but to be guided by it. It has been usual, I say, to ask the advice of this house, the hereditary great council of the nation, not to dictate to it. What does this speech say? It tells you of measures already agreed upon, and very cavalierly desires your concurrence. It, indeed, talks of wisdom and support. It counts on the certainty of events yet in the womb of time; but in point of plan and design, it is peremptory and dictatorial. Is this a proper language, fit to be endured? Is this high pretension to overrule the dispositions of Providence itself, and the will and judgment of parliament, justified by any former conduct or precedent?

No, it is the language of an ill-founded confidence: a confidence, I will be bold to say, supported hitherto only by a succession of disappointments, disgraces, and defeats. I am astonished how any minister dare advise his majesty to hold such a language to your lordships. I would be glad to see the minister that dare avow it in his place.

What is the import of this extraordinary application? What, but an unlimited confidence in those who have hitherto misguided, deceived, and misled you? It is, I maintain, unlimited. It desires you to grant not what you may be satisfied is necessary, but what his majesty's

ministers may choose to think so; troops, fleets, treaties, and subsidies, not yet revealed. Should your lordships agree to the present address, you will stand pledged to all this. You can not retreat. It binds you to the consequences, be they what they may. Whoever gave this pernicious counsel to the king, ought to be made answerable to this house, and to the nation at large, for the consequences. The precedent is dangerous and unconstitutional.

Who, I say, has had the temerity to tell the king that his affairs are in a prosperous condition? And who, of course, is the author of those assurances which are this day given you, in order to mislead you? What is the present state of this nation? It is big with difficulty and danger. It is full of the most destructive circumstances. I say, my lords, it is truly perilous. What are these little islands, Great Britain and Ireland? Nothing.

What is your defense?

What is the condition of your formidable and inveterate enemies, the two leading branches of the house of Bourbon? They have a formidable navy. I say their intentions are hostile. I know it. Their coasts are lined with troops, from the furthermost part of the coast of Spain up to Dunkirk. What have you to oppose them? Not five thousand men in this island; nor more in Ireland; nor above twenty ships of the line manned and fit for service. Without peace, without an immediate restoration of tranquillity, this nation is ruined. FROM CHATHAM,

XXXVIII.-ON AN ADDRESS TO THE KING.-No. II.

NOTE. Where a speech, like this, closes with a question which requires the rising inflection, the falling inflection should be substituted for the rising.

WHAT has been the conduct of our ministers? How have they endeavored to conciliate the affection and obedience of their American brethren? They have gone to Germany. They have sought the alliance and assistance of every pitiful, beggarly, insignificant, paltry German

prince, to cut the throats of their loyal, brave, and injured brethren in America. They have entered into mercenary treaties with those human butchers, for the purchase and sale of human blood.

But, this is not all. They have entered into other treaties. They have let the savages of America loose upon their innocent, unoffending brethren; upon the weak, the aged, and defenseless; on old men, women, and children; upon the very babes upon the breast, to be cut, mangled, sacrificed, broiled, roasted, nay, to be literally eaten alive.

These are the allies Great Britain now has: carnage, desolation, and destruction, wherever her arms are carried, is her newly adopted mode of making war. Our ministers have made alliances at the German shambles, and with the barbarians of America; with the merciless torturers of their species. Where they will next apply, I can not tell : having already scoured all Germany and America, to seek the assistance of cannibals and butchers.

The arms of this country are disgraced, even in victory as well as defeat. Is this consistent, my lords, with any part of our former conduct? Was it by means like these we arrived at that pinnacle of fame and grandeur, which, while it established our reputation in every quarter of the globe, gave the fullest testimony of our justice, mercy, and national integrity? Was it by the tomahawk and scalping-knife, that British valor and humanity became proverbial, and the triumphs of war and the éclat of conquest became but matters of secondary praise, when compared to those of national humanity, and national honor?

Was it by setting loose the savages of America, to imbrue their hands in the blood of our enemies, that the duties of the soldier, the citizen, and the man, came to be united? Is this honorable warfare? Does it correspond with the language of the poet, in

"The pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war,
That makes ambition a virtue?"

FROM CHATHAM.