第39章

What sort of men or Christians must you suppose the Americans to be, who, after seeing their most humble petitions insultingly rejected;the most grievous laws passed to distress them in every quarter; an undeclared war let loose upon them, and Indians and negroes invited to the slaughter; who, after seeing their kinsmen murdered, their fellow citizens starved to death in prisons, and their houses and property destroyed and burned; who, after the most serious appeals to heaven, the most solemn abjuration by oath of all government connected with you, and the most heart-felt pledges and protestations of faith to each other; and who, after soliciting the friendship, and entering into alliances with other nations, should at last break through all these obligations, civil and divine, by complying with your horrid and infernal proposal.Ought we ever after to be considered as a part of the human race? Or ought we not rather to be blotted from the society of mankind, and become a spectacle of misery to the world? But there is something in corruption, which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks upon, and sees every thing stained and impure; for unless you were capable of such conduct yourselves, you would never have supposed such a character in us.The offer fixes your infamy.It exhibits you as a nation without faith; with whom oaths and treaties are considered as trifles, and the breaking them as the breaking of a bubble.Regard to decency, or to rank, might have taught you better; or pride inspired you, though virtue could not.There is not left a step in the degradation of character to which you can now descend; you have put your foot on the ground floor, and the key of the dungeon is turned upon you.

That the invitation may want nothing of being a complete monster, you have thought proper to finish it with an assertion which has no foundation, either in fact or philosophy; and as Mr.Ferguson, your secretary, is a man of letters, and has made civil society his study, and published a treatise on that subject, I address this part to him.

In the close of the paragraph which I last quoted, France is styled the "natural enemy" of England, and by way of lugging us into some strange idea, she is styled "the late mutual and natural enemy"of both countries.I deny that she ever was the natural enemy of either; and that there does not exist in nature such a principle.

The expression is an unmeaning barbarism, and wholly unphilosophical, when applied to beings of the same species, let their station in the creation be what it may.We have a perfect idea of a natural enemy when we think of the devil, because the enmity is perpetual, unalterable and unabateable.It admits, neither of peace, truce, or treaty; consequently the warfare is eternal, and therefore it is natural.But man with man cannot arrange in the same opposition.

Their quarrels are accidental and equivocally created.They become friends or enemies as the change of temper, or the cast of interest inclines them.The Creator of man did not constitute them the natural enemy of each other.He has not made any one order of beings so.Even wolves may quarrel, still they herd together.If any two nations are so, then must all nations be so, otherwise it is not nature but custom, and the offence frequently originates with the accuser.England is as truly the natural enemy of France, as France is of England, and perhaps more so.Separated from the rest of Europe, she has contracted an unsocial habit of manners, and imagines in others the jealousy she creates in herself.Never long satisfied with peace, she supposes the discontent universal, and buoyed up with her own importance, conceives herself the only object pointed at.

The expression has been often used, and always with a fraudulent design; for when the idea of a natural enemy is conceived, it prevents all other inquiries, and the real cause of the quarrel is hidden in the universality of the conceit.Men start at the notion of a natural enemy, and ask no other question.The cry obtains credit like the alarm of a mad dog, and is one of those kind of tricks, which, by operating on the common passions, secures their interest through their folly.

But we, sir, are not to be thus imposed upon.We live in a large world, and have extended our ideas beyond the limits and prejudices of an island.We hold out the right hand of friendship to all the universe, and we conceive that there is a sociality in the manners of France, which is much better disposed to peace and negotiation than that of England, and until the latter becomes more civilized, she cannot expect to live long at peace with any power.Her common language is vulgar and offensive, and children suck in with their milk the rudiments of insult- "The arm of Britain! The mighty arm of Britain! Britain that shakes the earth to its center and its poles!