etter market. But it is the independance of this country of
Britain or any other, which is now the main and only object worthy of
contention, and which, like all other truths discovered by necessity,
will appear clearer and stronger every day.

First, Because it will come to that one time or other.

Secondly, Because, the longer it is delayed the harder it will be
to accomplish.

I have frequently amused myself both in public and private
companies, with silently remarking, the specious errors of those who
speak without reflecting. And among the many which I have heard, the
following seems most general, viz. that had this rupture happened
forty or fifty years hence, instead of NOW, the Continent would
have been more able to have shaken off the dependance. To which I
reply, that our military ability AT THIS TIME, arises from the
experience gained in the last war, and which in forty or fifty years
time, would have been totally extinct. The Continent, would not, by
that time, have had a General, or even a military officer left; and
we, or those who may succeed us, would have been as ignorant of
martial matters as the ancient Indians: And this single position,
closely attended to, will unanswerably prove, that the present time
is preferable to all others. The argument turns thus--at the
conclusion of the last war, we had experience, but wanted numbers;
and forty or fifty years hence, we should have numbers, without
experience; wherefore, the proper point of time, must be some
particular point between the two extremes, in which a sufficiency of
the former remains, and a proper increase of the latter is obtained:
And that point of time is the present time.

The reader will pardon this digression, as it does not properly
come under the head I first set out with, and to which I again return
by the following position, viz.

Should affairs be patched up with Britain, and she to remain the
governing and sovereign power of America, (which, as matters are now
circumstanced, is giving up the point intirely) we shall deprive
ourselves of the very means of sinking the debt we have, or may
contract. The value of the back lands which some of the provinces are
clandestinely deprived of, by the unjust extension of the limits of
Canada, valued only at five pounds sterling per hundred acres, amount
to upwards of twenty-five millions, Pennsylvania currency; and the
quit-rents at one penny sterling per acre, to two millions yearly.

It