world. The natural feelings of
every rational being will be against you, and wherever the story shall
be told, you will have neither excuse nor consolation left. With an
unsparing hand, and an insatiable mind, you have desolated the world,
to gain dominion and to lose it; and while, in a frenzy of avarice and
ambition, the east and the west are doomed to tributary bondage, you
rapidly earned destruction as the wages of a nation.

At the thoughts of a war at home, every man amongst you ought to
tremble. The prospect is far more dreadful there than in America. Here
the party that was against the measures of the continent were in general
composed of a kind of neutrals, who added strength to neither army.
There does not exist a being so devoid of sense and sentiment as to
covet "unconditional submission," and therefore no man in America could
be with you in principle. Several might from a cowardice of mind, prefer
it to the hardships and dangers of opposing it; but the same disposition
that gave them such a choice, unfitted them to act either for or against
us. But England is rent into parties, with equal shares of resolution.
The principle which produced the war divides the nation. Their
animosities are in the highest state of fermentation, and both sides, by
a call of the militia, are in arms. No human foresight can discern, no
conclusion can be formed, what turn a war might take, if once set on
foot by an invasion. She is not now in a fit disposition to make a
common cause of her own affairs, and having no conquests to hope for
abroad, and nothing but expenses arising at home, her everything is
staked upon a defensive combat, and the further she goes the worse she
is off.

There are situations that a nation may be in, in which peace or war,
abstracted from every other consideration, may be politically right or
wrong. When nothing can be lost by a war, but what must be lost without
it, war is then the policy of that country; and such was the situation
of America at the commencement of hostilities: but when no security can
be gained by a war, but what may be accomplished by a peace, the case
becomes reversed, and such now is the situation of England.

That America is beyond the reach of conquest, is a fact which experience
has shown and time confirmed, and this admitted, what, I ask, is now the
object of contention? If there be any honor in pursuing self-destruction
with inflexible passion--if national suicide be the pe