keenest imagination conceive.

Hitherto you have experienced the expenses, but nothing of the miseries
of war. Your disappointments have been accompanied with no immediate
suffering, and your losses came to you only by intelligence. Like fire
at a distance you heard not even the cry; you felt not the danger, you
saw not the confusion. To you every thing has been foreign but the taxes
to support it. You knew not what it was to be alarmed at midnight with
an armed enemy in the streets. You were strangers to the distressing
scene of a family in flight, and to the thousand restless cares and
tender sorrows that incessantly arose. To see women and children
wandering in the severity of winter, with the broken remains of a well
furnished house, and seeking shelter in every crib and hut, were matters
that you had no conception of. You knew not what it was to stand by and
see your goods chopped for fuel, and your beds ripped to pieces to make
packages for plunder. The misery of others, like a tempestuous night,
added to the pleasures of your own security. You even enjoyed the storm,
by contemplating the difference of conditions, and that which carried
sorrow into the breasts of thousands served but to heighten in you a
species of tranquil pride. Yet these are but the fainter sufferings
of war, when compared with carnage and slaughter, the miseries of a
military hospital, or a town in flames.

The people of America, by anticipating distress, had fortified their
minds against every species you could inflict. They had resolved to
abandon their homes, to resign them to destruction, and to seek new
settlements rather than submit. Thus familiarized to misfortune, before
it arrived, they bore their portion with the less regret: the justness
of their cause was a continual source of consolation, and the hope of
final victory, which never left them, served to lighten the load and
sweeten the cup allotted them to drink.

But when their troubles shall become yours, and invasion be transferred
upon the invaders, you will have neither their extended wilderness
to fly to, their cause to comfort you, nor their hope to rest upon.
Distress with them was sharpened by no self-reflection. They had not
brought it on themselves. On the contrary, they had by every proceeding
endeavored to avoid it, and had descended even below the mark of
congressional character, to prevent a war. The national honor or the
advantages of independence were matters whi