nature has not left
in our power to say we can forgive.

Your lordship wishes for an opportunity to plead before Congress the
cause of England and America, and to save, as you say, both from ruin.

That the country, which, for more than seven years has sought our
destruction, should now cringe to solicit our protection, is adding the
wretchedness of disgrace to the misery of disappointment; and if England
has the least spark of supposed honor left, that spark must be darkened
by asking, and extinguished by receiving, the smallest favor from
America; for the criminal who owes his life to the grace and mercy of
the injured, is more executed by living, than he who dies.

But a thousand pleadings, even from your lordship, can have no effect.
Honor, interest, and every sensation of the heart, would plead against
you. We are a people who think not as you think; and what is equally
true, you cannot feel as we feel. The situations of the two countries
are exceedingly different. Ours has been the seat of war; yours has seen
nothing of it. The most wanton destruction has been committed in our
sight; the most insolent barbarity has been acted on our feelings. We
can look round and see the remains of burnt and destroyed houses, once
the fair fruit of hard industry, and now the striking monuments of
British brutality. We walk over the dead whom we loved, in every part of
America, and remember by whom they fell. There is scarcely a village but
brings to life some melancholy thought, and reminds us of what we have
suffered, and of those we have lost by the inhumanity of Britain. A
thousand images arise to us, which, from situation, you cannot see, and
are accompanied by as many ideas which you cannot know; and therefore
your supposed system of reasoning would apply to nothing, and all your
expectations die of themselves.

The question whether England shall accede to the independence of
America, and which your lordship says is to undergo a parliamentary
discussion, is so very simple, and composed of so few cases, that it
scarcely needs a debate.

It is the only way out of an expensive and ruinous war, which has no
object, and without which acknowledgment there can be no peace.

But your lordship says, the sun of Great Britain will set whenever she
acknowledges the independence of America.--Whereas the metaphor would
have been strictly just, to have left the sun wholly out of the figure,
and have ascribed her not acknowledging it