ing advantage
of our deplorable situation, which left us no choice, they were to treat
us as the lowest and vilest of all mercenaries,--if they were to send us
far from the aid of our king and our suffering country, to squander us
away in the most pestilential climates for a venal enlargement of their
own territories, for the purpose of trucking them, when obtained, with
those very robbers and murderers they had called upon us to oppose with
our blood? What would be our sentiments, if in that miserable service we
were not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes,
but as outcasts of the human race? Whilst we were fighting those battles
of their interest and as their soldiers, how should we feel, if we were
to be excluded from all their cartels? How must we feel, if the pride
and flower of the English nobility and gentry, who might escape the
pestilential clime and the devouring sword, should, if taken prisoners,
be delivered over as rebel subjects, to be condemned as rebels, as
traitors, as the vilest of all criminals, by tribunals formed of Maroon
negro slaves, covered over with the blood of their masters, who were
made free and organized into judges for their robberies and murders?
What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarous
protection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Hollanders? Should we not obtest
Heaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth? Oppression makes
wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which
is better than the sobriety of fools. Their cry is the voice of sacred
misery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified frenzy of
prophecy and inspiration. In that bitterness of soul, in that
indignation of suffering virtue, in that exaltation of despair, would
not persecuted English loyalty cry out with an awful warning voice, and
denounce the destruction that waits on monarchs who consider fidelity
to them as the most degrading of all vices, who suffer it to be punished
as the most abominable of all crimes, and who have no respect but for
rebels, traitors, regicides, and furious negro slaves, whose crimes have
broke their chains? Would not this warm language of high indignation
have more of sound reason in it, more of real affection, more of true
attachment, than all the lullabies of flatterers who would hush monarchs
to sleep in the arms of death? Let them be well convinced, that, if ever
this example should prevail in its whole exten