Benjamin Franklin

Our claims before the war contained some security; but that is no reason why we should neglect acquiring more, when the demand of more is become reasonable.

The present war teaches us, that disputes arising in America may be an occasion of embroiling nations; who have no concerns there.

If the French remain in Canada and Louisiana, fix the boundaries as you will between us and them, we must border on each other for more than fifteen hundred miles.

The people that inhabit the frontiers are generally the refuse of both nations, often of the worst morals and the least discretion; remote from the eye, the prudence, and the restraint of government.

Injuries are therefore frequently, in some part or other of so long a frontier, committed on both sides, resentment provoked, the colonies first engaged, and then the mother countries.

The flames of war, once kindled, often spread far and wide, and the mischief is infinite.

While the French retain their influence over the Indians, they can easily keep our long extended frontier in continual alarm, by a very few of those people; and with a small number of regulars and militia, in such a country, we find they…

Happy as we now are, under the best of kings, and in the prospect of a succession promising every felicity a nation was ever blessed with; happy too in the wisdom and vigour of every part of the administration; we cannot, we ought not to…

The safety of a considerable part of the state, and the interest of the whole, are not to be trusted to the wisdom and vigour of future administrations; when a security is to be had more effectual, more constant, and much less expensive.

Unprejudiced men well know, that all the penal and prohibitory laws that ever were thought on will not be sufficient to prevent manufactures in a country, whose inhabitants surpass the number that can subsist by the husbandry of it.

That this will be the case in America soon, if our people remain confined within the mountains, and almost as soon should it be unsafe for them to live beyond, though the country be ceded to us, no man acquainted with political and…

The extended population, therefore, that is most advantageous to Great Britain, will be best effected, because only effectually secured, by our possession of Canada.

But when Britain values herself as affording us protection, we desire it may be considered, that we have followed her in all her wars, and joined with her at our own expence against all she thought fit to quarrel with.

Canada has also found means to make this nation spend two or three millions a year in America; and a people, how small soever, that in their present situation, can do this as often as we have a war with them, is, methinks, "an enemy to be…

Where the frontier people owe and pay obedience, there they have a right to look for protection: no political proposition is better established than this.

I hope it will appear before I end these sheets, that if ever there was a national war, this is truly such a one: a war in which the interest of the whole nation is directly and fundamentally concerned.

Those, who would be thought deeply skilled in human nature, affect to discover self-interested views every where at the bottom of the fairest, the most generous conduct.

I agree with the Gentleman, that with Canada in our possession, our people in America will increase amazingly.

In proportion, therefore, as the demand increases for the manufactures of Britain, by the increase of people in her colonies, the number of her people at home will increase; and with them, the strength as well as the wealth of the nation.

I answer, that the inland parts of America in question are well known to be fitted for the production of hemp, flax, pot-ash, and above all, silk; the southern parts may produce olive-oil, raisins, currants, indigo, and cochineal.

If the growths of a country find their way out of it; the manufactures of the country where they go will infallibly find their way into it.

They, who understand the economy and principles of manufactures, know, that it is impossible to establish them in places not populous: and even in those that are populous, hardly possible to establish them to the prejudices of the places…

A part of such a system cannot support itself without the whole: and before the whole can be obtained the part perishes.

Manufactures, where they are in perfection, are carried on by a multiplicity of hands, each of which is expert only in his own part; no one of them a master of the whole; and, if by any means spirited away to a foreign country, he is lost…

Our legal method of compulsion is by imprisonment: the Indians cannot and will not imprison one another; and if we attempt to imprison them, I apprehend it would be generally disliked by the nations, and occasion breaches.