Historical voices

The matter is come now to a full crisis, and peace is easy if willingly set about.

America has set you the example, and you may follow it and be free.

Trade flourishes best when it is free, and it is weak policy to attempt to fetter it.

If independent, she flourishes, and from her flourishing must your profits arise.

If conquered, she is ruined; and if ruined, poor; consequently the trade will be a trifle, and her credit doubtful.

It is your interest to see America an independent, and not a conquered country.

The more I reflect on this matter, the more I am satisfied at the blindness and ill policy of my countrymen, whose wisdom seems to operate without discernment, and their strength without an object.

We are rich by contrivance of our own, which would have ceased as soon as you became masters.

Had America been conquered, she might have been parcelled out in grants to the favorites at court, but no share of it would have fallen to you.

You must all pay towards the expense; the poorest among you must bear his share, and it is both your right and your duty to weigh seriously the matter.

Listening for the sound of victory, and led away by the frenzy of arms, you neglected to reckon either the cost or the consequences.

In short, you spend your substance in vain, and impoverish yourselves without a hope.

She is at least your equal in the world, and her independence neither rests upon your consent, nor can it be prevented by your arms.

Most of the arguments made use of by the ministry for supporting the war, are the very arguments that ought to have been used against supporting it; and the plans, by which they thought to conquer, are the very plans in which they were…

My endeavor was to have the matter well understood on both sides, and I conceived myself tendering a general service, by setting forth to the one the impossibility of being conquered, and to the other the impossibility of conquering.

The one is like a young heir coming to a large improvable estate; the other like an old man whose chances are over, and his estate mortgaged for half its worth.

By a curious kind of revolution in accounts, the people of England seem to mistake their poverty for their riches; that is, they reckon their national debt as a part of their national wealth.

A new case is to them a new world, and while they are seeking for a parallel they get lost.

They know no other influence than corruption and reckon all their probabilities from precedent.

You might have humored her, even if there had been no justice in her claims, without any risk to your reputation; for Europe, fascinated by your fame, would have ascribed it to your benevolence, and America, intoxicated by the grant, would…

Had you been true politicians you would have seen all this, and continued to draw from the magic of a name, the force and authority of a nation.

It produced to you all the advantages of real power; and you were stronger through the universality of that charm, than any future fleets and armies may probably make you.

You were known and dreaded abroad; and it would have been wise in you to have suffered the world to have slept undisturbed under that idea.

But towards America she has observed no character at all; and destroyed by her conduct what she assumed in her title.