Your enemies have said you are friends to absolute monarchy and despotism, and that you have offered yourselves as tools in the hands of Administration, to rivet the chains forging for your brethren in America. I hope and think my knowledge of you authorizes the assertion that you are friends to liberty, and the natural and avowed enemies of tyranny and usurpation. All of you, I doubt not, came into the Country with a determined resolution of finishing here your days; nor dare I doubt but that, fired with the best and noblest species of human emulation, you would wish to transmit to the rising generation that best of all patrimonies, the legacy of freedom.
Private views, and offers of immediate reward, can only operate on base and unmanly minds. That soul in which the love of liberty ever dwelt must reject, with honest indignation, every idea of preferment, founded on the ruins of a virtuous and deserving people. I would have you look up to the Constitution of Britain as the best and surest safeguard to your liberties. Whenever an attempt is made to violate its fundamental principles, every effort becomes laudable which may tend to preserve its natural purity and perfection.
The warmest advocates for Administration have candor sufficient to admit that the people of Great Britain have no right to tax America. If they have not, for what are they contending? It will, perhaps, be answered, for the dignity of Government. Happy would it be for those who advance this doctrine to consider, that there is more real greatness and genuine magnanimity in acknowledging an error, than in persisting in it. Miserable must that state be, whose rulers, rather than give up a little punctilio, would endanger the lives of thousands of its subjects in a quarrel, the injustice and impropriety of which is universally acknowledged. If the Americans wish for anything more than is set forth in the address of the last Congress to the King and people of Great Britain—if independence is their aim—by removing their real grievances, their artificial ones (if any they should avow) will soon appear, and with them will their cause be deserted by every friend to limited monarchy, and by every well-wisher to the interests of America. I have endeavored, in this uncultivated home-spun essay, to avoid prolixity as much as possibly I could. I have aimed at no flowers of speech, no touches of rhetorick, which are too often made use of to amuse, and not to instruct or persuade the understanding. I have no views but your good, and the credit of the Country from whence you came.
In case Government should prevail, and be able to tax America without the least show of representation, it would be to me a painful reflection to think, that the children of the land to which I owe my existence, should have been the cause of plunging millions into perpetual bondage.
If we cannot be of service to the cause, let us not be an injury to it. Let us view this Continent as a country marked out by the great God of nature as a receptacle for distress, and where the industrious and virtuous may range in the fields of freedom, happy under their own fig trees, freed from a swarm of petty tyrants, who disgrace countries the most polished and civilized, and who more particularly infest that region from whence you
Scotius Americanus."[186]
NOTE E.
Ingratitude of the Highlanders.
"Brigadier-General Donald McDonald was in rebellion in the year 1745, against his lawful sovereign, and headed many of the same clan and name, who are now his followers. These emigrants, from the charity and benevolence of the Assembly of North-Carolina, received large pecuniary contributions, and, to encourage them in making their settlements, were exempted from the payment of taxes for several years. It is a fact, that numbers of that ungrateful people, who have been lately in arms, when they arrived in Carolina, were without the necessaries of life—their passage even paid by the charitable contributions of the inhabitants. They have since, under every encouragement that the Province of North-Carolina could afford them, acquired fortunes very rapidly, and thus they requite their benefactor.—Virginia Gazette."[187]