none but conceited pretenders in public business will hold any other language:  and none but weak and unexperienced men will believe them, if they should.  If we were found in such a crisis, let those, whose bold designs, and whose defective arrangements, brought us into it, answer for the consequences.  The business of the then ministry evidently was, to take such steps, not as the wishes of our author, or as their own wishes dictated, but as the bad situation in which their predecessors had left them, absolutely required.

The disobedience to this act was universal throughout America; nothing, it was evident, but the sending a very strong military, backed by a very strong naval force, would reduce the seditious to obedience.  To send it to one town, would not be sufficient; every province of America must be traversed, and must be subdued.  I do not entertain the least doubt but this could be done.  We might, I think, without much difficulty, have destroyed our colonies.  This destruction might be effected, probably in a year, or in two at the utmost.  If the question was upon a foreign nation, where every successful stroke adds to your own power, and takes from that of a rival, a just war with such a certain superiority would be undoubtedly an advisable measure.  But four million of debt due to our merchants, the total cessation of a trade annually worth four millionmore, a large foreign traffic, much home manufacture, a very capital immediate revenue arising from colony imports, indeed the produce of every one of our revenues greatly depending on this trade, all these were very weighty accumulated considerations, at least well to be weighed, before that sword was drawn, which even by its victories must produce all the evil effects of the greatest national defeat.  How public credit must have suffered, I need not say.  If the condition of the nation, at the close of our foreign war, was what this author represents it, such a civil war would have been a bad couch, on which to repose our wearied virtue.  Far from being able to have entered into new plans of economy, we must have launched into a new sea, I fear a boundless sea, of expense.  Such an addition of debt, with such a diminution of revenue and trade, would have left us in no want of a “State of the Nation” to aggravate the picture of our distresses.

Our trade felt this to its vitals; and our then ministers were not ashamed to say, that they sympathized with the feelings of our merchants.  The universal alarm of the whole trading body of England, will never be laughed at by them as an ill-grounded or a pretended panic.  The universal desire of that body will always have great weight with them in every consideration connected with commerce:  neither ought the opinion of that body to be slighted (notwithstanding the contemptuous and indecent language of this author and his associates) in any consideration whatsoever of revenue.  Nothing amongst us is more quickly or deeply affected by taxes of any kind than trade; and if an American tax was a real relief to England, no part of the community would be sooner or more materially relieved by it than our merchants.  But they well know that the trade of England must be more burdened by one penny raised in America, than by three in England; and if that penny be raised with the uneasiness, the discontent, and the confusion of America, more than by ten.