tant
cessation of arms, though they wished for a reconciliation. Thus
Earl Temple said, that the war ought not to be abandoned until we had
obtained decisive victories in America. The opposition, also, differed
as to the propriety of offering terms of concession; and they were not
all agreed as to what these terms should be. But on the odiousness of
employing the wild Indians against a Christian people, the views of the
whole of the opposition orators coincided. The Duke of Richmond said,
that our employment of them would call down the vengeance of Heaven;
and he argued, that our soldiers, acting with them, would become as
ferocious as the Indians, and ready to commit any atrocity, or to make
any attack on the liberties of the country that ministers might command!
The unpleasant task of defending the employment of wild Indians fell
upon Lord Suffolk, one of the secretaries of state, and he contended
that the measure was allowable on principle; inasmuch as it was
justifiable to use all the means that God and nature had put into our
hands. This was an unfortunate argument; and the Earl of Chatham did not
fail to take advantage of it. Forgetting that he had once employed the
Indian tomahawk, he rose, and exclaimed, with an indignant burst
of eloquence:--"I am astonished--shocked to hear such principles
confessed--to hear them avowed in this house, or in this
country--principles equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and unchristian.
My lords, I did not intend to have trespassed again on your attention,
but I cannot repress my indignation. I feel myself impelled by every
duty. My lords, we are called upon, as members of this house, as men,
as Christian men, to protest against such notions, standing near the
throne, polluting the ear of majesty! 'That God and nature put into our
hands!' I know not what idea that lord may entertain of God and nature;
but I know that such abominable principles are equally abhorrent to
religion and humanity. What! attribute the sacred sanction of God and
nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife--to the cannibal
savage, torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating--literally, my lords,
_eating_--the mangled victims of his barbarous battles--To send forth
the merciless cannibal, thirsting for blood! Against whom?--Against
your Protestant brethren; to lay waste their country, to desolate
their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name with these horrible
hell-hounds of savage war--hell-hou