u; and therefore my conclusion is, remove from
a bad position as quickly as you can. The disgrace and the necessity of
yielding, both of them, grow upon you every hour of your delay....

To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so distracted as
ours, is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would ennoble the
flights of the highest genius and obtain pardon for the efforts of the
meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by
degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived at length some confidence
from what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less
anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of
what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would
not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its
reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally destitute of
all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, I was very sure that
if my proposition were futile or dangerous, if it were weakly conceived
or improperly timed, there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe,
dazzle, or delude you. You will see it just as it is; and you will treat
it just as it deserves.

The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of War; not
Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless
negotiations; not Peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from
principle in all parts of the empire; not Peace to depend on the
juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking
of the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple Peace,
sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is Peace
sought in the spirit of Peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I
propose by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the
_former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country_,
to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of
ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the same act and
by the bond of the very same interest which reconciles them to British
government.

My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the parent of
confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good
intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is
surely detected at last, is, let me say, of no mean force in the
government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is a