sion of others.
What argument, therefore, do we want to show the equity of our
conduct; or motive of interest to recommend it to our prudence?
Nature points out the path, and our enemies have obliged us to
pursue it.

If there is any man so base or so weak as to prefer a dependence on
Great Britain to the dignity and happiness of living a member of a
free and independent nation, let me tell him that necessity now
demands what the generous principle of patriotism should have
dictated.

We have no other alternative than independence, or the most
ignominious and galling servitude. The legions of our enemies
thicken on our plains; desolation and death mark their bloody
career; whilst the mangled corpses of our countrymen seem to cry out
to us as a voice from heaven:--

"Will you permit our posterity to groan under the galling chains of
our murderers? Has our blood been expended in vain? Is the only
benefit which our constancy till death has obtained for our country,
that it should be sunk into a deeper and more ignominious vassalage?
Recollect who are the men that demand your submission, to whose
decrees you are invited to pay obedience. Men who, unmindful of
their relation to you as brethren; of your long implicit submission
to their laws; of the sacrifice which you and your forefathers made
of your natural advantages for commerce to their avarice; formed a
deliberate plan to wrest from you the small pittance of property
which they had permitted you to acquire. Remember that the men who
wish to rule over you are they who, in pursuit of this plan of
despotism, annulled the sacred contracts which they had made with
your ancestors; conveyed into your cities a mercenary soldiery to
compel you to submission by insult and murder; who called your
patience cowardice, your piety hypocrisy."

Countrymen, the men who now invite you to surrender your rights into
their hands are the men who have let loose the merciless savages to
riot in the blood of their brethren; who have dared to establish
Popery triumphant in our land; who have taught treachery to your
slaves, and courted them to assassinate your wives and children.

These are the men to whom we are exhorted to sacrifice the blessings
which Providence holds out to us; the happiness, the dignity, of
uncontrolled freedom and independence.

Let not your generous indignation be directed against any among us
who may advise so absurd and maddening a measure. Their number