VINDICATION FROM DISHONOR.

315

LXXX.-VINDICATION FROM DISHONOR.

EMMET.

LET no man dare when I am dead to charge me with dishonor; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country's liberty and independence; or that I could have become the pliant minion of power in the oppression or the miseries of my countrymen. The proclamation of the provisional government speaks for our views; no inference can be tortured from it to countenance barbarity or debasement at home, or subjection, humiliation, or treachery from abroad; I would not have submitted to a foreign oppressor; in the dignity of freedom I would have fought upon the threshold of my country, and its enemy should enter only by passing over my lifeless corpse. Am I, who lived but for my country, and who have subjected myself to the dangers of the jealous and watchful oppressor, and the bondage of the grave, only to give my countrymen their rights, and my country her independence, and am I to be loaded with calumny, and not suffered to resent or repel it? No, God forbid !

My lords, you are impatient for the sacrifiice-the blood which you seek, is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled, through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy, for purposes so grievous, that they cry to heaven. Be yet patient! I have but a few words more to say. I am going to my cold and silent grave: my lamp of life is nearly extinguished: my race is run the grave opens to receive me, and I sink into its bosom! I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world,— it is the charity of its silence!-Let no man write my epitaph: for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rejoice in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.

LXXXI.-REMOVAL OF THE TROOPS FROM BOSTON.

СНАТНАМ.

WHEN your lordships look at the papers transmitted us from America; when you consider their decency, firmness, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause, and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must declare and avow, that in all my reading and observation—I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world that for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal. We shall be forced ultimately to retract; let us retract while we can, not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent oppressive acts; they must be repealed—you will repeal them; I stake my reputation on it—I will consent to be taken for an idiot, if they are not finally repealed. Avoid, then, this humiliating, disgraceful necessity. With a dignity becoming your exalted station, make the first advances to concord, to peace and happiness; for that is your true dignity, to act prudence and justice. That you should first concede is obvious from sound and rational policy. Concession comes with better grace and more salutary effect from superior power. It reconciles superiority of power with the feelings of men, and establishes solid confidence on the foundations of affection and gratitude.

Every motive, therefore, of justice and of policy, of dignity and of prudence, urges you to allay the ferment in America, by a removal of your troops from Boston, by a repeal of your acts of parliament, and by a demonstration of amicable dispositions towards your colonies. On the other hand, every danger and every hazard impend, to deter you from perseverance in your present ruinous measure. Foreign war hanging over your head by a slight and brittle thread. France and Spain watching your conduct, and waiting for the maturity of your errors; with a vigilant eye to America, and the temper of your colonies, more than to their own concerns, be they what they may.

YOU CANNOT CONQUER AMERICA.

317

To conclude, my lords, if the ministers thus persevere in misadvising and misleading the king, I will not say, that they can alienate the affections of his subjects from his crown; but I will affirm, that they will make the crown not worth his wearing I will not say that the king is betrayed; but I will pronounce, that the kingdom is undone.

:

LXXXII-YOU CANNOT CONQUER AMERICA.

CHATHAM.

It cost

My lords, this ruinous and ignominious situation, where we cannot act with success, nor suffer with honor, calls upon us to remonstrate in the strongest and loudest language of truth, to rescue the ear of majesty from the delusions which surround it. The desperate state of our arms abroad is in part known: no man thinks more highly of them than I do. I love and honor the English troops. I know their virtues and their valor. I know they can achieve anything except impossibilities; and I know that the conquest of English America is an impossibility. You cannot, I venture to say it, you cannot conquer America. Your armies in the last war effected everything that could be effected; and what was it? a numerous army, under the command of a most able general, now a noble lord in this House, a long and laborious campaign, to expel five thousand Frenchmen from French America. My lords, you cannot conquer America. What is your present situation then? We do not know the worst ; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. Besides the sufferings, perhaps total loss, of the northern force; the best appointed army that ever took the field, commanded by Sir William Howe, has retired from the American lines. He was obliged to relinquish his attempt, and, with great delay and danger, to adopt a new and distant place of operations. We shall soon know, and in any event have reason to lament, what may have happened since. As to conquest, therefore, my lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense, and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince, that sells and sends his subjects

to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent: doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely. For it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies-to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their positions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms -never-never-never!

LXXXIII-DAYS OF DESOLATION.

ALISON.

THIS inundation of infidelity was soon followed by sterner days; to the unrestrained indulgence of passion, succeeded the unfettered march of crime. With the destruction of all the bonds which held families together; with the removal of all the restraints on vice or guilt, the fabric of civilization and religion speedily was dissolved. To the licentious orgies of the Regent Orleans succeeded the infernal furies of the Revolution from the same Palais Royal from whence had sprung those fountains of courtly corruption, soon issued forth the fiery stream of democracy. Enveloped in this burning torrent, the institutions, the faith, the nobles, the throne were destroyed; the worst instruments of the supreme justice, the passions and ambition of men, were suffered to work

their unresisted way and in a few years the religion of eighteen hundred years was abolished, its priests slain or exiled, its Sabbath abolished, its rights proscribed, its faith unknown. Infancy came into the world without a blessing, age left it without a hope; marriage no longer received a benediction; sickness was left without consolation; the village bell ceased to call the poor to their weekly day of sanctity and repose; the village churchyard to witness the weeping train of mourners attending their rude forefathers to their last home. The grass grew in the churches of every parish in France; the dead without a blessing were thrust into charnel-houses; marriage was contracted before a civil magistrate; and infancy untaught to pronounce the name of God, longed only for the period when the passions and indulgences of life were to commence.

INDULGENCES TO THE CATHOLICS.

319

LXXXIV.-INDULGENCES TO THE CATHOLICS.

SYDNEY SMITH.

WHAT amuses me the most is, to hear of the indulgences which the Catholics have received, and their exorbitance in not being satisfied with those indulgences now if you complain to me that a man is obtrusive and shameless in his requests, and that it is impossible to bring him to reason, I must first of all hear the whole of your conduct towards him; for you may have taken from him so much in the first instance, that, in spite of a long series of restitution, a vast latitude for petition may still remain behind.

There is a village (no matter where) in which the inhabitants, on one day in the year, sit down to a dinner prepared at the common expense; by an extraordinary piece of tyranny (which Lord Hawkesbury would call the wisdom of the village ancestors), the inhabitants of three of the streets, about an hundred years ago, seized upon the inhabitants of the fourth street, bound them hand and foot, laid them upon their backs, and compelled them to look on while the rest were stuffing themselves with beef and beer; the next year, the inhabitants of the persecuted street (though they contributed an equal quota of the expense), were treated precisely in the same manner. The tyranny grew into a custom; and (as the manner of our nature is), it was considered as the most sacred of all duties to keep these poor fellows without their annual dinner; the village was so tenacious of this practice, that nothing could induce them to resign it; every enemy to it was looked upon as a disbeliever in Divine Providence, and any nefarious churchwarden who wished to suc ceed in his election had nothing to do but to represent his antagonist as an abolitionist, in order to frustrate his ambition, endanger his life, and throw the village into a state of most dreadful commotion. By degrees, however, the obnoxious street grew to be so well peopled, and its inhabitants so firmly united, that their oppressors, more afraid of injustice, were more disposed to be just. At the next dinner they are unbound, the year after allowed to sit upright, then a bit of bread and a glass of water; till, at last, after a long series of concessions, they are emboldened to ask, in pretty plain terms, that they may be allowed to sit down at the bottom of the table, and to fill their bellies as well as the rest.