and should tell him: "Young man, there is Am which at this day serves for little more than t you with stories of savage men, and uncouth m yet shall, before you taste of death, show itse to the whole of that commerce which now attr envy of the world. Whatever England has bee ing to by a progressive increase of improvement, in by varieties of people, by succession of civiliz quests and civilizing settlements in a series of se hundred years, you shall see as much added to America in the course of a single life!" If this his country had been foretold to him, would it not all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all the glow of enthusiasm, to make him believe it? F man, he has lived to see it! Fortunate, indee lives to see nothing that shall vary the prosp cloud the setting of his day!

Excuse me, Sir, if turning from such though sume this comparative view once more. You ha it on a large scale; look at it on a small one. point out to your attention a particular instance the single province of Pennsylvania. In the ye that province called for £11,459 in value of yo modities, native and foreign. This was the whole. did it demand in 1772? Why, nearly fifty t much; for in that year the

export to Pennsylva

£507,909, nearly equal to the export to all the

together in the first period.

I choose, Sir, to enter into these minute and particular details, because generalities, which in all other cases are apt to heighten and raise the subject, have here a tendency to sink it. When we speak of the commerce 5 with our Colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination cold and barren.

So far, Sir, as to the importance of the object, in view of its commerce, as concerned in the exports from England. If I were to detail the imports, I could show how 10 many enjoyments they procure which deceive the burthen of life; how many materials which invigorate the springs of national industry, and extend and animate every part of our foreign and domestic commerce. This would be a curious subject indeed; but I must prescribe 15 bounds to myself in a matter so vast and various.

I pass, therefore, to the Colonies in another point of view, their agriculture. This they have prosecuted with such a spirit, that, besides feeding plentifully their own growing multitude, their annual export of grain, compre20 hending rice, has some years ago exceeded a million in value. Of their last harvest I am persuaded they will export much more. At the beginning of the century some of these Colonies imported corn from the Mother Country. For some time past the Old World has been 25 fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.

30 As to the wealth which the Colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment 35 has been exercised ought rather, in my opinion, to have

ing for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear have pierced into the opposite region of polar they are at the antipodes, and engaged under t Serpent of the south. Falkland Island, whic too remote and romantic an object for the national ambition, is but a stage and resting the progress of their victorious industry. N equinoctial heat more discouraging to them tha cumulated winter of both the poles. We k whilst some of them draw the line and strike the on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude sue their gigantic game along the coast of Br sea but what is vexed by their fisheries; no cli is not witness to their toils. Neither the pers of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever ca most perilous mode of hardy industry to the which it has been pushed by this recent peopl ple who are still, as it were, but in the gristle yet hardened into the bone of manhood. template these things; when I know that the in general owe little or nothing to any care of that they are not squeezed into this happy for constraints of watchful and suspicious governi that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a nature has been suffered to take her own way t tion; when I reflect upon these effects, when I profitable they have been to us, I feel all the

Whe

power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of humar contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

I am sensible, Sir, that all which I have asserted in my 5 detail is admitted in the gross; but that quite a different conclusion is drawn from it. America, gentlemen say, is a noble object. It is an object well worth fighting for. Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them. Gentlemen in this respect will be led 10 to their choice of means by their complexions and their habits. Those who understand the military art will of course have some predilection for it. Those who wield the thunder of the state may have more confidence in the efficacy of arms. But I confess, possibly for want of this 15 knowledge, my opinion is much more in favor of prudent management than of force; considering force not as an odious, but a feeble instrument for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate connection with us.

20

First, Sir, permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again; and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.

25 My next objection is its uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force, and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are without resource; for, conciliation failing, force remains; but, force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left. Power and 30 authority are sometimes bought by kindness; but they can never be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence.

A further objection to force is, that you impair the object by your very endeavors to preserve it. The thing 35 you fought for is not the thing which you recover; but

depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest. Nothing less will content me than whole America. I do not choose to consume its strength along with our own, because in all parts it is the British strength that I consume. I do not choose to be caught by a foreign enemy 5 at the end of this exhausting conflict; and still less in the midst of it. I may escape; but I can make no insurance against such an event. Let me add, that I do not choose wholly to break the American spirit; because it is the spirit that has made the country.

10

Lastly, we have no sort of experience in favor of force as an instrument in the rule of our Colonies. Their growth and their utility has been owing to methods altogether different. Our ancient indulgence has been said to be pursued to a fault. It may be so. But we know, if 15 feeling is evidence, that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt to mend it; and our sin far more salutary than our penitence.

These, Sir, are my reasons for not entertaining that high opinion of untried force by which many gentlemen, 20 for whose sentiments in other particulars I have great respect, seem to be so greatly captivated. But there is still behind a third consideration concerning this object which serves to determine my opinion on the sort of policy which ought to be pursued in the management of 25 America, even more than its population and its commerce —I mean its temper and character.

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous 30 affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English 35