that the proposal ought to originate from us.  Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself.  The superior power may offer peace with honor and with safety.  Such an offer from such a power will be attributed to magnanimity.  But the concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.  When such a one is disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior; and he loses forever that time and those chances, [Footnote:  13] which, as they happen to all men, are the strength and resources of all inferior power.

The capital leading questions on which you must this day decide are these two:  First, whether you ought to concede; and secondly, what your concession ought to be.  On the first of these questions we have gained, as I have just taken the liberty of observing to you, some ground.  But I am sensible that a good deal more is still to be done.  Indeed, Sir, to enable us to determine both on the one and the other of these great questions with a firm and precise judgment, I think it may be necessary to consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances of the object which we have before us; because after all our struggle, whether we will or not, we must govern America according to that nature and to those circumstances, [Footnote:  14] and not according to our own imaginations, nor according to abstract ideas of right—­by no means according to mere general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no better than arrant trifling.  I shall therefore endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am able to state them.

The first thing that we have to consider with regard to the nature of the object is—­the number of people in the Colonies.  I have taken for some years a good deal of pains on that point.  I can by no calculation justify myself in placing the number below two millions of inhabitants of our own European blood and color, besides at least five hundred thousand others, who form no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the whole.  This, Sir, is, I believe, about the true number.  There is no occasion to exaggerate where plain truth is of so much weight and importance.  But whether I put the present numbers too high or too low is a matter of little moment.  Such is the strength with which population shoots in that part of the world, that, state the numbers as high as we will, whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends.  Whilst we are discussing any given magnitude, they are grown to it.  Whilst we spend our time in deliberating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall find we have millions more to manage.  Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations.