our colonies are, I am afraid,
unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of
this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a
nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in
which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the
imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest
person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

I think it is nearly as little in our power to change their republican
religion as their free descent, or to substitute the Roman Catholic as a
penalty, or the Church of England as an improvement. The mode of
inquisition and dragooning is going out of fashion in the Old World, and
I should not confide much to their efficacy in the New. The education of
the Americans is also on the same unalterable bottom with their
religion. You cannot persuade them to burn their books of curious
science, to banish their lawyers from their courts of law, or to quench
the lights of their assemblies by refusing to choose those persons who
are best read in their privileges. It would be no less impracticable to
think of wholly annihilating the popular assemblies in which these
lawyers sit. The army, by which we must govern in their place, would be
far more chargeable to us, not quite so effectual, and perhaps, in the
end, full as difficult to be kept in obedience.

With regard to the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the southern
colonies, it has been proposed, I know, to reduce it by declaring a
general enfranchisement of their slaves. This project has had its
advocates and panegyrists; yet I never could argue myself into any
opinion of it. Slaves are often much attached to their masters. A
general wild offer of liberty would not always be accepted. History
furnishes few instances of it. It is sometimes as hard to persuade
slaves to be free as it is to compel freemen to be slaves; and in this
auspicious scheme we should have both these pleasing tasks on our hands
at once. But when we talk of enfranchisement, do we not perceive that
the American master may enfranchise, too, and arm servile hands in
defence of freedom?--a measure to which other people have had recourse
more than once, and not without success, in a desperate situation of
their affairs.

Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are
from slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from
that ver