In such
a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?
Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired,
honored, loved, and cherished? Would not the exiles of England alone be
my government and my fellow-citizens? Would not their places of refuge
be my temporary country? Would not all my duties and all my affections
be there, and there only? Should I consider myself as a traitor to my
country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of
every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them
on their enemies? Could I in any way show myself more a patriot? What
should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering
brethren,--who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants,--and
could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?
What ought I to think and feel, if, being geographers instead of kings,
they recognized the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the rivers
polluted with blood, of this geometrical measurement, as the honorable
member of Europe called England? In that condition, what should we think
of Sweden, Denmark, or Holland, or whatever power afforded us a churlish
and treacherous hospitality, if they should invite us to join the
standard of our king, our laws, and our religion,--if they should give
us a direct promise of protection,--if, after all this, taking advantage
of our deplorable situation, which left us no choice, they were to treat
us as the lowest and vilest of all mercenaries,--if they were to send us
far from the aid of our king and our suffering country, to squander us
away in the most pestilential climates for a venal enlargement of their
own territories, for the purpose of trucking them, when obtained, with
those very robbers and murderers they had called upon us to oppose with
our blood? What would be our sentiments, if in that miserable service we
were not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes,
but as outcasts of the human race? Whilst we were fighting those battles
of their interest and as their soldiers, how should we feel, if we were
to be excluded from all their cartels? How must we feel, if the pride
and flower of the English nobility and gentry, who might escape the
pestilential clime and the devouring sword, should, if taken prisoners,
be delivered over as rebel subjects, to be condemned as rebels, as
traitors, as the vilest of all criminals, by tribunals formed of Maroon
negro slaves, covered over with the blood of their masters, who were
made free and organized into judges for their robberies and murders?
What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarous
protection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Hollanders? Should we not obtest
Heaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth? Oppression makes
wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which
is better than the sobriety of fools.
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