possibility of a return to our ancient happy concord, arguments for
our continuance in this course are drawn from the wretched situation
itself into which we have been betrayed. It is said, that, being at war
with the colonies, whatever our sentiments might have been before, all
ties between us are now dissolved, and all the policy we have left is to
strengthen the hands of government to reduce them. On the principle of
this argument, the more mischiefs we suffer from any administration, the
more our trust in it is to be confirmed. Let them but once get us into a
war, and then their power is safe, and an act of oblivion passed for all
their misconduct.

But is it really true that government is always to be strengthened with
the instruments of war, but never furnished with the means of peace? In
former times, ministers, I allow, have been sometimes driven by the
popular voice to assert by arms the national honor against foreign
powers. But the wisdom of the nation has been far more clear, when those
ministers have been compelled to consult its interests by treaty. We all
know that the sense of the nation obliged the court of Charles the
Second to abandon the _Dutch war_: a war, next to the present, the most
impolitic which we ever carried on. The good people of England
considered Holland as a sort of dependency on this kingdom; they dreaded
to drive it to the protection or subject it to the power of France by
their own inconsiderate hostility. They paid but little respect to the
court jargon of that day; nor were they inflamed by the pretended
rivalship of the Dutch in trade,--by the massacre at Amboyna, acted on
the stage to provoke the public vengeance,--nor by declamations against
the ingratitude of the United Provinces for the benefits England had
conferred upon them in their infant state. They were not moved from
their evident interest by all these arts; nor was it enough to tell
them, they were at war, that they must go through with it, and that the
cause of the dispute was lost in the consequences. The people of England
were then, as they are now, called upon to make government strong. They
thought it a great deal better to make it wise and honest.

When I was amongst my constituents at the last summer assizes, I
remember that men of all descriptions did then express a very strong
desire for peace, and no slight hopes of attaining it from the
commission sent out by my Lord Howe. And it is not a little remarkable,