The ministry, and many of the minority, sacrifice their time in
disputing on a question with which they have nothing to do, namely,
whether America shall be independent or not. Whereas the only question
that can come under their determination is, whether they will accede to
it or not. They confound a military question with a political one, and
undertake to supply by a vote what they lost by a battle. Say she shall
not be independent, and it will signify as much as if they voted
against a decree of fate, or say that she shall, and she will be no more
independent than before. Questions which, when determined, cannot be
executed, serve only to show the folly of dispute and the weakness of
disputants.

From a long habit of calling America your own, you suppose her governed
by the same prejudices and conceits which govern yourselves. Because you
have set up a particular denomination of religion to the exclusion of
all others, you imagine she must do the same, and because you, with an
unsociable narrowness of mind, have cherished enmity against France and
Spain, you suppose her alliance must be defective in friendship.
Copying her notions of the world from you, she formerly thought as you
instructed, but now feeling herself free, and the prejudice removed, she
thinks and acts upon a different system. It frequently happens that
in proportion as we are taught to dislike persons and countries, not
knowing why, we feel an ardor of esteem upon the removal of the mistake:
it seems as if something was to be made amends for, and we eagerly give
in to every office of friendship, to atone for the injury of the error.
But, perhaps, there is something in the extent of countries, which,
among the generality of people, insensibly communicates extension of the
mind. The soul of an islander, in its native state, seems bounded by
the foggy confines of the water's edge, and all beyond affords to him
matters only for profit or curiosity, not for friendship. His island
is to him his world, and fixed to that, his every thing centers in it;
while those who are inhabitants of a continent, by casting their eye
over a larger field, take in likewise a larger intellectual circuit,
and thus approaching nearer to an acquaintance with the universe, their
atmosphere of thought is extended, and their liberality fills a wider
space. In short, our minds seem to be measured by countries when we are
men, as they are by places when we are children, and until som