hed out like
so many tempests from all points of the compass, and were accompanied
first with great fleets and armies of English, and followed afterwards
with great bodies of foreign troops, he thought that their cause grew
daily better, because daily more defensive,--and that ours, because
daily more offensive, grew daily worse. He therefore, in two motions, in
two successive years, proposed in Parliament many concessions beyond
what he had reason to think in the beginning of the troubles would ever
be seriously demanded.

So circumstanced, he certainly never could and never did wish the
colonists to be subdued by arms. He was fully persuaded, that, if such
should be the event, they must be held in that subdued state by a great
body of standing forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly
of opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, in a
conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and
afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a
state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the
liberties of England itself; that in the mean time this military system
would lie as an oppressive burden upon the national finances; that it
would constantly breed and feed new discussions, full of heat and
acrimony, leading possibly to a new series of wars; and that foreign
powers, whilst we continued in a state at once burdened and distracted,
must at length obtain a decided superiority over us. On what part of his
late publication, or on what expression that might have escaped him in
that work, is any man authorized to charge Mr. Burke with a
contradiction to the line of his conduct and to the current of his
doctrines on the American war? The pamphlet is in the hands of his
accusers: let them point out the passage, if they can.

Indeed, the author has been well sifted and scrutinized by his friends.
He is even called to an account for every jocular and light expression.
A ludicrous picture which he made with regard to a passage in the speech
of a late minister[10] has been brought up against him. That passage
contained a lamentation for the loss of monarchy to the Americans, after
they had separated from Great Britain. He thought it to be unseasonable,
ill-judged, and ill-sorted with the circumstances of all the parties.
Mr. Burke, it seems, considered it ridiculous to lament the loss of some
monarch or other to a rebel people, at the moment they had foreve