e mistaken in your words than in your actions, can declare to all the
world, that so far as our knowledge goes, there is not a more detestable
character, nor a meaner or more barbarous enemy, than the present
British one. With us, you have forfeited all pretensions to reputation,
and it is only by holding you like a wild beast, afraid of your keepers,
that you can be made manageable. But to return to the point in question.

Though I can think no man innocent who has lent his hand to destroy
the country which he did not plant, and to ruin those that he could not
enslave, yet, abstracted from all ideas of right and wrong on the
original question, Captain Asgill, in the present case, is not the
guilty man. The villain and the victim are here separated characters.
You hold the one and we the other. You disown, or affect to disown and
reprobate the conduct of Lippincut, yet you give him a sanctuary; and by
so doing you as effectually become the executioner of Asgill, as if you
had put the rope on his neck, and dismissed him from the world. Whatever
your feelings on this interesting occasion may be are best known to
yourself. Within the grave of your own mind lies buried the fate of
Asgill. He becomes the corpse of your will, or the survivor of your
justice. Deliver up the one, and you save the other; withhold the one,
and the other dies by your choice.

On our part the case is exceeding plain; an officer has been taken from
his confinement and murdered, and the murderer is within your lines.
Your army has been guilty of a thousand instances of equal cruelty,
but they have been rendered equivocal, and sheltered from personal
detection. Here the crime is fixed; and is one of those extraordinary
cases which can neither be denied nor palliated, and to which the custom
of war does not apply; for it never could be supposed that such a brutal
outrage would ever be committed. It is an original in the history
of civilized barbarians, and is truly British. On your part you are
accountable to us for the personal safety of the prisoners within your
walls. Here can be no mistake; they can neither be spies nor suspected
as such; your security is not endangered, nor your operations subjected
to miscarriage, by men immured within a dungeon. They differ in every
circumstance from men in the field, and leave no pretence for severity
of punishment. But if to the dismal condition of captivity with you must
be added the constant apprehensions of