There is but a step between you and ruin: and should our patriots succeed in their endeavours to urge you on to take that step, and hostilities actually commence, New England will stand recorded a singular monument of human folly and wickedness. I beg leave to transcribe a little from the Farmer's letters.—"Good Heaven! Shall a total oblivion of former tendernesses and blessings be spread over the minds of a good and wise people by the sordid arts of intriguing men, who covering their selfish projects under pretences of public good, first enrage their countrymen into a frenzy of passion, and then advance their own influence and interest by gratifying the passion, which they themselves have excited?" When cool dispassionate posterity shall consider the affectionate intercourse, the reciprocal benefits, and the unsuspecting confidence, that have subsisted between these colonies and their parent state, for such a length of time, they will execrate, with the bitterest curses, the infamous memory of those men whose ambition unnecessarily, wantonly, cruelly, first opened the sources of civil discord.
MASSACHUSETTENSIS.
ADDRESSED
To the Inhabitants of the Province of Massachusetts Bay,
March 27, 1775.
MY DEAR COUNTRYMEN,
OUR patriots exclaim, "that humble and reasonable petitions from the representatives of the people have been frequently treated with contempt." This is as virulent a libel upon his majesty's government, as falshood and ingenuity combined could fabricate. Our humble and reasonable petitions have not only been ever graciously received, when the established mode of exhibiting them has been observed, but generally granted. Applications of a different kind, have been treated with neglect, though not always with the contempt they deserved. These either originated in illegal assemblies, and could not be received without implicitly countenancing such enormities, or contained such matter, and were conceived in such terms, as to be at once an insult to his majesty, and a libel on his government. Instead of being decent remonstrances against real grievances, or prayers for their removal, they were insidious attempts to wrest from the crown, or the supreme legislature, their inherent, unalienable prerogatives or rights.
We have a recent instance of this kind of petition, in the application of the continental congress to the king, which starts with these words: "A standing army has been kept in these colonies ever since the conclusion of the late war, without the consent of our assemblies." This is a denial of the king's authority to station his military forces in such parts of the empire, as his majesty may judge expedient for the common safety. They might with equal propriety have advanced one step further, and denied its being a prerogative of the crown to declare war, or conclude a peace, by which the colonies should be affected, without the consent of our assemblies. Such petitions carry the marks of death in their faces, as they cannot be granted but by surrendering some constitutional right at the same time; and therefore afford grounds for suspicion at least, that they were never intended to be granted, but to irritate and provoke the power petitioned to. It is one thing to remonstrate the inexpediency or inconveniency of a particular act of the prerogative, and another to deny the existence of the prerogative. It is one thing to complain of the inutility or hardship of a particular act of parliament, and quite another to deny the authority of parliament to make any act. Had our patriots confined themselves to the former, they would have acted a part conformable to the character they assumed, and merited the encomiums they arrogate.
There is not one act of parliament that respects us, but would have been repealed, upon the legislators being convinced, that it was oppressive; and scarcely one, but would have shared the same fate, upon a representation of its being generally disgustful to America. But, by adhering to the latter, our politicians have ignorantly or wilfully betrayed their country. Even when Great Britain has relaxed in her measures, or appeared to recede from her claims, instead of manifestations of gratitude, our politicians have risen in their demands, and sometimes to such a degree of insolence, as to lay the British government under a necessity of persevering in its measures to preserve its honour.
It was my intention, when I began these papers, to have minutely examined the proceedings of the continental congress, as the delegates appear to me to have given their country a deeper wound, than any of their predecessors had inflicted, and I pray God it may not prove an incurable one; but am in some measure anticipated by Grotius, Phileareine, and the many pamphlets that have been published; and shall therefore confine my observations to some of its most striking and characteristic features.