Whilst we lament the measures adopted by the public councils of the kingdom, we do not mean to question the legal validity of their proceedings.  We do not desire to appeal from them to any person whatsoever.  We do not dispute the conclusive authority of the bodies in which we have a place over all their members.  We know that it is our ordinary duty to submit ourselves to the determinations of the majority in everything, except what regards the just defence of our honor and reputation.  But the situation into which the British empire has been brought, and the conduct to which we are reluctantly driven in that situation, we hold ourselves bound by the relation in which we stand both to the crown and the people clearly to explain to your Majesty and our country.

We have been called upon in the speech from the throne at the opening of this session of Parliament, in a manner peculiarly marked, singularly emphatical, and from a place from whence anything implying censure falls with no common weight, to concur in unanimous approbation of those measures which have produced our present distresses and threaten us in future with others far more grievous.  We trust, therefore, that we shall stand justified in offering to our sovereign and the public our reasons for persevering inflexibly in our uniform dissent from every part of those measures.  We lament them from an experience of their mischief, as we originally opposed them from a sure foresight of their unhappy and inevitable tendency.

We see nothing in the present events in the least degree sufficient to warrant an alteration in our opinion.  We were always steadily averse to this civil war,—­not because we thought it impossible that it should be attended with victory, but because we were fully persuaded that in such a contest victory would only vary the mode of our ruin, and by making it less immediately sensible would render it the more lasting and the more irretrievable.  Experience had but too fully instructed us in the possibility of the reduction of a free people to slavery by foreign mercenary armies.  But we had an horror of becoming the instruments in a design, of which, in our turn, we might become the victims.  Knowing the inestimable value of peace, and the contemptible value of what was sought by war, we wished to compose the distractions of our country, not by the use of foreign arms, but by prudent regulations in our own domestic policy.  We deplored, as your Majesty has done in your speech from the throne, the disorders which prevail in your empire; but we are convinced that the disorders of the people, in the present time and in the present place, are owing to the usual and natural cause of such disorders at all times and in all places, where such have prevailed,—­the misconduct of government;—­that they are owing to plans laid in error, pursued with obstinacy, and conducted without wisdom.