amidst the horrors of which they may satiate their avarice, and glut their revenge.  Let then the purity of my motives be unimpeached, if I should be defeated in the accomplishment of my object.  But why should I despair of success, when I have every support that ought to ensure it?  Right, reason, expediency, morality, religion, are all on the side of my oppressed country, and must eventually procure the termination of her sufferings.  The disabilities, indeed, under which she has been so long groaning, grounded as they are in no motives of policy, but averse to them all, ought rather to be ascribed to inadvertence than design.  Engaged as this country has been in a tremendous conflict, on the dubious issue of which her very existence as a nation was staked, she has had little or no leisure for attending to the internal economy of her colonies:  in the midst of her own unparalleled sufferings and sacrifices, theirs have been disregarded or forgotten.  It is the knowledge of this circumstance that has shed a ray of hope and consolation athwart the gloom which has been thickening year after year around the colony.  It is this consideration that has enabled its inhabitants to support burdens which would otherwise have been found intolerable.  Let then their just expectations be at length fulfilled, and let them not continue the only portion of the king’s subjects, who have no personal reason to rejoice at the happy termination of this long and arduous contest.  Their moderation and forbearance under their grievances, have given them an additional claim to redress, scarcely less forcible than the existence of the grievances themselves.  Yet already years have elapsed, since the consolidation of general peace and tranquillity, and no attention has been paid to their situation and remonstrances.  Already, therefore, the spirit of discontent so long repressed by hope, but reviving with the progress of this unnecessary, this unaccountable delay, has begun to manifest itself, and will soon assume a determinate shape and form.  Let the government repress this feeling of hostility, while they have yet the power:  a few years further inattention will render it hereditary and rivet it for ever.  It is in the tendency of colonies to overstep even legitimate restraint; they will never long wear the fetters of injustice and oppression.  I am aware that it is not one of the least difficult proofs of legislative wisdom to frame regulations adapted to each progressive stage of colonization, and that this difficulty increases with the maturity which the colony in question may have attained; but although the treatment of colonies upon their arrival at that degree of ascendency, when the enforcement of ancient restrictions, founded on the interests, or supposed interests of the parent country, but contraventory of the prosperity of the colonies themselves, becomes dangerous or impracticable, is, it must be allowed, a point of extreme delicacy and tenderness; there can at no time be any doubt