She has encouraged and sustained America; and, whether America be wrong or right, the dignity of this country ought to spurn at the officious insult of French interference. Can even our Ministers sustain a more humiliating disgrace? Do they dare to resent it? Do they presume even to hint a vindication of their honor and the dignity of the State, by requiring the dismissal of the plenipotentiaries of America? The people, whom they affected to call contemptible rebels, but whose growing power has at last obtained the name of enemies, the people with whom they have engaged this country in war, and against whom they now command our implicit support in every measure of desperate hostility,—this people, despised as rebels, or acknowledged as enemies, are abetted against you, supplied with every military store, their interests consulted, and their ambassadors entertained, by your inveterate enemy, and our Ministers dare not interpose with dignity or effect.

My Lords, this ruinous and ignominious situation, where we cannot act with success nor suffer with honor, calls upon us to remonstrate in the strongest and loudest language of truth, to rescue the ear of Majesty from the delusions which surround it. You cannot, I venture to say, you cannot conquer America. What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. You may swell every expense, and strain every effort, still more extravagantly; accumulate every assistance you can beg or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German

Prince, that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country: your efforts are forever vain and impotent, doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the sordid sons of rapine and of plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty. If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms!-never! never! never!

THE AMERICAN COLONIES-BARRE.

They fled

The honorable member has asked: "And now will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite?" They planted by your care! No, your oppressions planted them in America. from your tyranny to a then uncultivated and inhospitable country, where they exposed themselves to almost all the hardships to which human nature is liable; and, among others, to the cruelties of a savage foe the most subtle, and I will take upon me to say the most formidable, of any people upon the face of God's earth; and yet, actuated by principles of true English liberty, our American brethren met all hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own country from the hands of those that should have been their friends.

They nourished up by your indulgence! They grew by your neglect of them. As soon as you began

to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule them in one department and another, who were, perhaps, the deputies of deputies to some members of this House, sent to spy out their liberties, to misrepresent their actions, and to prey upon them; men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest seats of justice, some who, to my knowledge, were glad by going to a foreign country to escape being brought to the bar of a court of justice in their own.

They protected by your arms! They have nobly taken up arms in your defence; have exerted a valor amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defense of a country whose frontier was drenched in blood, while its interior parts yielded all its little savings to your emolument. And, believe me,―remember I this day told you so,-that same spirit of freedom which actuated that people at first will accompany them still; but prudence forbids me to explain myself further. God knows I do not at this time speak from motives of party heat. What I deliver are the genuine sentiments of my heart. However superior to me in general knowledge and experience the respectable body of this House may be, yet I claim to know more of America than most of you, having seen and been conversant in that country. The people, I believe, are as truly loyal as any subjects the king has; but they are a people jealous of their liberties, and who will vindicate them to the last drop of their blood, if they should ever be violated.

THE COLONISTS NOT REBELS -WILKES.

Mr. Speaker! The Address to the King upon the disturbances in North America now reported from the Committee of the whole House appears to be unfounded, rash, and sanguinary. It draws the sword unjustly against America. It mentions, sir, the particular province of Massachusetts Bay as in a state of actual rebellion. The other provinces are held out to our indignation as aiding and abetting. Arguments have been employed to involve them in all the consequences of an open, declared rebellion, and to obtain the fullest orders for our officers and troops to act against them as rebels. Whether their present state is that of rebellion, or of a fit and just resistance to unlawful acts of power,-resistance to our attempts to rob them of their property and liberties, as they imagine,-I shall not declare. This I know, a successful resistance is a revolution, not a rebellion. Rebellion indeed appears on the back of a flying enemy: but revolution flames on the breastplate of the victorious warrior. Who can tell, sir, whether in consequence of this day's violent and mad Address to his Majesty the scabbard may not be thrown away by them as well as by us; and, should success attend them, whether in a few years. the independent Americans may not celebrate the glorious era of the Revolution of 1775, as we do that of 1688?

The policy, sir, of this measure I can no more comprehend than I can acknowledge the justice of it. Is your force adequate to the attempt? I am satisfied it is not. Boston, indeed, you may lay in ashes, or it may be made a strong garrison; but the

province will be lost to you. Boston will be like Gibraltar. You will hold in the province of Massachusetts Bay, as you do in Spain, a single town, while the whole country remains in the power and possession of the enemy. Where your fleets and armies are stationed, the possession will be secured, while they continue; but all the rest will be lost. In the great scale of empire you will decline, I fear, from the decision of this day; and the Americans will rise to independence, to power, to all the greatness of the most renowned states.

For they build

on the solid basis of general public liberty.

I tremble, sir, at the almost certain consequences of such an Address, founded in cruelty and injustice, equally contrary to the sound maxims of true policy, and the unerring rule of natural right. The Americans will certainly defend their property and their liberties with the spirit which our ancestors exerted, and which, I hope, we should exert on a like occasion. They will sooner declare themselves independent, and risk every consequence of such a contest, than submit to the galling yoke which Administration is preparing for them. An Address of this sanguinary nature cannot fail of driving them to despair. They will see that you are preparing, not only to draw the sword, but to burn the scabbard. In the most harsh manner you are declaring them rebels. Every idea of a reconciliation will now vanish. They will pursue the most vigorous course in their own defence. The whole continent of North America will be dismembered from Great Britain, and the wide arch of the raised empire will fall. But may the just vengeance of the people