thought, give up that other fatal error, the
superstition that up to the present unhappy moment the colonies had
derived great benefits from living under the protecting wing of the
mother country. Protection! "We have boasted the protection of
Great Britain, without considering that her motive was interest not
attachment; and that she did not protect us from our enemies ON OUR OWN
ACCOUNT, but from her enemies ON HER OWN ACCOUNT, from those who have no
quarrel with us on any other account, and who will always be our enemies
ON THE SAME ACCOUNT." An odd sort of protection that, which served
only to entangle the colonies in the toils of European intrigues and
rivalries, and to make enemies of those who would otherwise befriends!
"Our duty to mankind at large, as well as to ourselves, instructs us to
renounce the alliance: because, any submission to, or dependence upon,
Great Britain, tends directly to involve this continent in European wars
and quarrels, and set us at variance with nations who would otherwise
seek our friendship and against whom we have neither anger nor
complaint."

What foolishness then to seek reconciliation, even if it were possible!
Reconciliation at this stage would be the ruin of America. If King
George were indeed clever, he would eagerly repeal all the obnoxious
acts and make every concession; for when the colonies had once become
reconciled he could accomplish by "craft and subtlety, in the long run,
what he cannot do by force and violence in the short one." The colonies,
having come to maturity, cannot always remain subject to tutelage; like
the youth who has reached his majority, they must sooner or later go
their own way. Why not now? Beware of reconciliation and of all those
who advocate it, for they are either "interested men, who are not to be
trusted, weak men who cannot see, prejudiced men who will not see, or a
certain set of moderate men who think better of the European world than
it deserves."

Such arguments were indeed precisely suited to convince men that
independence, so far from being an event in which they had become
entangled by the fatal network of circumstance, was an event which they
freely willed. "Read by almost every American, and recommended as a work
replete with truth, against which none but the partial and prejudiced
can form any objection,... it satisfied multitudes that it is their true
interest immediately to cut the Gordian knot by which the... colonists
have be