most
answer for its success. I cannot be certain of its reception in the bad
company it may keep. In such heterogeneous assortments, the most
innocent person will lose the effect of his innocency. Though you should
send out this angel of peace, yet you are sending out a destroying angel
too; and what would be the effect of the conflict of these two adverse
spirits, or which would predominate in the end, is what I dare not say:
whether the lenient measures would cause American passion to subside, or
the severe would increase its fury,--all this is in the hand of
Providence. Yet now, even now, I should confide in the prevailing virtue
and efficacious operation of lenity, though working in darkness and in
chaos, in the midst of all this unnatural and turbid combination: I
should hope it might produce order and beauty in the end.

Let us, Sir, embrace some system or other before we end this session. Do
you mean to tax America, and to draw a productive revenue from thence?
If you do, speak out: name, fix, ascertain this revenue; settle its
quantity; define its objects; provide for its collection; and then
fight, when you have something to fight for. If you murder, rob; if you
kill, take possession; and do not appear in the character of madmen as
well as assassins, violent, vindictive, bloody, and tyrannical, without
an object. But may better counsels guide you!

Again, and again, revert to your old principles,--seek peace and ensue
it,--leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I
am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to
mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical
distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they
anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest,
will die along with it. They and we, and their and our ancestors, have
been happy under that system. Let the memory of all actions in
contradiction to that good old mode, on both sides, be extinguished
forever. Be content to bind America by laws of trade: you have always
done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do not burden
them by taxes: you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this
be your reason for not taxing. These are the arguments of states and
kingdoms. Leave the rest to the schools; for there only they may be
discussed with safety. But if, intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you
sophisticate and poison the very source of g