the laws on which they are to give you advice.  It behoves you, therefore, to think and to act for yourself and your people.  The great principles of right and wrong are legible to every reader:  to pursue them, requires not the aid of many counsellors.  The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.  Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.  No longer persevere in sacrificing the rights of one part of the empire, to the inordinate desires of another:  but deal out to all, equal and impartial right.  Let no act be passed by any one legislature, which may infringe on the rights and liberties of another.  This is the important post in which fortune has placed you, holding the balance of a great, if a well poised empire.  This, Sire, is the advice of your great American council, on the observance of which may, perhaps, depend your felicity and future fame, and the preservation of that harmony which alone can continue, both to Great Britain and America, the reciprocal advantages of their connection.  It is neither our wish nor our interest to separate from her.  We are willing, on our part, to sacrifice every thing which reason can ask, to the restoration of that tranquillity for which all must wish.  On their part, let them be ready to establish union on a generous plan.  Let them name their terms, but let them be just.  Accept of every commercial preference it is in our power to give, for such things as we can raise for their use, or they make for ours.  But let them not think to exclude us from going to other markets, to dispose of those commodities which they cannot use, nor to supply those wants which they cannot supply.  Still less, let it be proposed, that our properties, within our own territories, shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth, but our own.  The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time:  the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.  This, Sire, is our last, our determined resolution.  And that you will be pleased to interpose, with that efficacy which your earnest endeavors may insure, to procure redress of these our great grievances, to quiet the minds of your subjects in British America against any apprehensions of future encroachment, to establish fraternal love and harmony through the whole empire, and that that may continue to the latest ages of time, is the fervent prayer of all British America,’

[NOTE D.]—­August, 1774., Instructions for the Deputies

Instructions for the Deputies appointed to meet in General Congress on the Part of this Colony.

The unhappy disputes between Great Britain and her American colonies, which began about the third year of the reign of his present Majesty, and since, continually increasing, have proceeded to lengths so dangerous and alarming, as to excite just apprehensions in the minds of his Majesty’s faithful subjects of this colony, that they are in danger of being deprived of their natural, ancient, constitutional, and chartered