would be led to combat only with regret.  They would not enter into a war of this description with the same animosity and desire of vengeance that might actuate their leaders.  They would behold in their opponents, Britons, or the descendants of Britons, placed in hostile array against them unwillingly, and not from any ancient and inveterate spirit of hatred and rivality, but from constrained resistance to tyranny, and in vindication of their most sacred and indubitable rights.  Nor would they in the midst of their disgust for so unjust and unnatural a contest, behold the beauty and fertility of the country without drawing a comparison between their condition, and what it would be, were they to quit the ranks of oppression, and become the champions of that independence, which they were destined to repress.  Such will be the consequences of the impolitic and oppressive system of government pursued in this colony; such the probable results of the contest to which it must eventually give rise.  If I have been unqualified in expressing my reprobation of such unwise and unjust measures; if I have evinced myself the fearless assertor of the rights of my compatriots; and if I have spoke without reserve of the resistance which the violation and suppression of those rights will in the end occasion, I must nevertheless protest against being classed among those who are the sworn enemies of all authority, and who place the happiness of communities in a freedom from those restraints which the wisdom of ages has established, and demonstrated to be salutary and essential.  I hope, therefore, that my principles will not be mistaken, and that I shall not be exposed to the hue and cry which have been justly raised against those persons who are inimical to all existing institutions.  There is not a more sincere friend to established government and legitimacy than he who mildly advocates the cause of reform, and points out with decency the excrescences that will occasionally rise on the political body, as well from an excess of liberty as of restraint:  such a person may prevent anarchy; he can never occasion it.

These are the views by which I have been actuated in writing this essay.  If my hopes should be realized, if I should happily be the means of averting the thunder cloud of calamity and destruction which is even now gathering on the horizon of my country, and threatens at no very remote period to burst over its head, and to scatter death and desolation in its bosom, it is all the recompence I seek.  If my efforts should unfortunately prove abortive; if I should fail to rouse the friends of peace and humanity to its succour and relief, I shall have experienced a sufficient mortification, without undergoing the additional one of being classed with a band of ruffian levellers, who under the specious pretext of salutary reform seek, like the jacobin revolutionists of France, the subversion of all order, and the substitution in its stead, of a reign of terror, anarchy, and rapine,