of life, and mistake them for recovery. New schemes, like
new medicines, have administered fresh hopes, and prolonged the disease
instead of curing it. A change of generals, like a change of physicians,
served only to keep the flattery alive, and furnish new pretences for
new extravagance.

"Can Britain fail?"* has been proudly asked at the undertaking of every
enterprise; and that "whatever she wills is fate,"*(2) has been given
with the solemnity of prophetic confidence; and though the question
has been constantly replied to by disappointment, and the prediction
falsified by misfortune, yet still the insult continued, and your
catalogue of national evils increased therewith. Eager to persuade
the world of her power, she considered destruction as the minister of
greatness, and conceived that the glory of a nation like that of an
[American] Indian, lay in the number of its scalps and the miseries
which it inflicts.

* Whitehead's New Year's ode for 1776.
*(2) Ode at the installation of Lord North, for Chancellor of the
University of Oxford.

Fire, sword and want, as far as the arms of Britain could extend them,
have been spread with wanton cruelty along the coast of America; and
while you, remote from the scene of suffering, had nothing to lose
and as little to dread, the information reached you like a tale of
antiquity, in which the distance of time defaces the conception, and
changes the severest sorrows into conversable amusement.

This makes the second paper, addressed perhaps in vain, to the people
of England. That advice should be taken wherever example has failed,
or precept be regarded where warning is ridiculed, is like a picture
of hope resting on despair: but when time shall stamp with universal
currency the facts you have long encountered with a laugh, and the
irresistible evidence of accumulated losses, like the handwriting on
the wall, shall add terror to distress, you will then, in a conflict of
suffering, learn to sympathize with others by feeling for yourselves.

The triumphant appearance of the combined fleets in the channel and at
your harbor's mouth, and the expedition of Captain Paul Jones, on the
western and eastern coasts of England and Scotland, will, by placing
you in the condition of an endangered country, read to you a stronger
lecture on the calamities of invasion, and bring to your minds a truer
picture of promiscuous distress, than the most finished rhetoric can
describe or the