and injustice may be attended
with as much feebleness in the execution as severity in the formation.

In consequence of these terrors, which, falling upon some, threatened
all, the colonies made a common cause with the sufferers, and proceeded,
on their part, to acts of resistance. In that alarming situation, we
besought your Majesty's ministers to entertain some distrust of the
operation of coercive measures, and to profit of their experience.
Experience had no effect. The modes of legislative rigor were construed,
not to have been erroneous in their policy, but too limited in their
extent. New severities were adopted. The fisheries of your people in
America followed their charters; and their mutual combination to defend
what they thought their common rights brought on a total prohibition of
their mutual commercial intercourse. No distinction of persons or merits
was observed: the peaceable and the mutinous, friends and foes, were
alike involved, as if the rigor of the laws had a certain tendency to
recommend the authority of the legislator.

Whilst the penal laws increased in rigor, and extended in application
over all the colonies, the direct force was applied but to one part. Had
the great fleet and foreign army since employed been at that time called
for, the greatness of the preparation would have declared the magnitude
of the danger. The nation would have been alarmed, and taught the
necessity of some means of reconciliation with our countrymen in
America, who, whenever they are provoked to resistance, demand a force
to reduce them to obedience full as destructive to us as to them. But
Parliament and the people, by a premeditated concealment of their real
situation, were drawn into perplexities which furnished excuses for
further armaments, and whilst they were taught to believe themselves
called to suppress a riot, they found themselves involved in a mighty
war.

At length British blood was spilled by British hands: a fatal era, which
we must ever deplore, because your empire will forever feel it. Your
Majesty was touched with a sense of so great a disaster. Your paternal
breast was affected with the sufferings of your English subjects in
America. In your speech from the throne, in the beginning of the session
of 1775, you were graciously pleased to declare yourself inclined to
relieve their distresses and to pardon their errors. You felt their
sufferings under the late penal acts of Parliament. But your minis