either
massacred or robbed of all and transported; the Christian religion, in
all its denominations, forbidden and persecuted; the law totally,
fundamentally, and in all its parts, destroyed; the judges put to death
by revolutionary tribunals; the peers and commons robbed to the last
acre of their estates, massacred, if they stayed, or obliged to seek
life in flight, in exile, and in beggary; that the whole landed property
should share the very same fate; that every military and naval officer
of honor and rank, almost to a man, should be placed in the same
description of confiscation and exile; that the principal merchants and
bankers should be drawn out, as from an hen-coop, for slaughter; that
the citizens of our greatest and most flourishing cities, when the hand
and the machinery of the hangman were not found sufficient, should have
been collected in the public squares and massacred by thousands with
cannon; if three hundred thousand others should have been doomed to a
situation worse than death in noisome and pestilential prisons. In such
a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?
Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired,
honored, loved, and cherished? Would not the exiles of England alone be
my government and my fellow-citizens? Would not their places of refuge
be my temporary country? Would not all my duties and all my affections
be there, and there only? Should I consider myself as a traitor to my
country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of
every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them
on their enemies? Could I in any way show myself more a patriot? What
should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering
brethren,--who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants,--and
could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?
What ought I to think and feel, if, being geographers instead of kings,
they recognized the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the rivers
polluted with blood, of this geometrical measurement, as the honorable
member of Europe called England? In that condition, what should we think
of Sweden, Denmark, or Holland, or whatever power afforded us a churlish
and treacherous hospitality, if they should invite us to join the
standard of our king, our laws, and our religion,--if they should give
us a direct promise of protection,--if, after all this, tak