oring
province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and
enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and
fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these
colonies;

"For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws,
and altering, fundamentally, the _forms_ of our governments;

"For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves
invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

"He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his
protection and waging war against us.

"He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns,
and destroyed the lives of our people.

"He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign
mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and
tyranny, already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally
unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

"He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high
seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the
executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves
by their hands.

"He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored
to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian
savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

"In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for
redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been
answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus
marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the
ruler of a free people.

"Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We
have warned them, from time to time, of attempts, by their
legislature, to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We
have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and
settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and
magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common
kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably
interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been
deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We