would heap new
difficulties upon it, if it were in my power. All the ancient, honest,
juridical principles and institutions of England are so many clogs to
check and retard the headlong course of violence and oppression. They
were invented for this one good purpose, that what was not just should
not be convenient. Convinced of this, I would leave things as I found
them. The old, cool-headed, general law is as good as any deviation
dictated by present heat.

I could see no fair, justifiable expedience pleaded to favor this new
suspension of the liberty of the subject. If the English in the colonies
can support the independency to which they have been unfortunately
driven, I suppose nobody has such a fanatical zeal for the criminal
justice of Henry the Eighth that he will contend for executions which
must be retaliated tenfold on his own friends, or who has conceived so
strange an idea of English dignity as to think the defeats in America
compensated by the triumphs at Tyburn. If, on the contrary, the colonies
are reduced to the obedience of the crown, there must be, under that
authority, tribunals in the country itself fully competent to administer
justice on all offenders. But if there are not, and that we must
suppose a thing so humiliating to our government as that all this vast
continent should unanimously concur in thinking that no ill fortune can
convert resistance to the royal authority into a criminal act, we may
call the effect of our victory peace, or obedience, or what we will, but
the war is not ended; the hostile mind continues in full vigor, and it
continues under a worse form. If your peace be nothing more than a
sullen pause from arms, if their quiet be nothing but the meditation of
revenge, where smitten pride smarting from its wounds festers into new
rancor, neither the act of Henry the Eighth nor its handmaid of this
reign will answer any wise end of policy or justice. For, if the bloody
fields which they saw and felt are not sufficient to subdue the reason
of America, (to use the expressive phrase of a great lord in office,) it
is not the judicial slaughter which is made in another hemisphere
against their universal sense of justice that will ever reconcile them
to the British government.

I take it for granted, Gentlemen, that we sympathize in a proper horror
of all punishment further than as it serves for an example. To whom,
then does the example of an execution in England for this American
rebel