at a time when she prayed concession at our feet. Just as much
was I an American, when I wished Parliament to offer terms in victory,
and not to wait the well-chosen hour of defeat, for making good by
weakness and by supplication a claim of prerogative, preeminence, and
authority.

Instead of requiring it from me, as a point of duty, to kindle with your
passions, had you all been as cool as I was, you would have been saved
disgraces and distresses that are unutterable. Do you remember our
commission? We sent out a solemn embassy across the Atlantic Ocean, to
lay the crown, the peerage, the commons of Great Britain at the feet of
the American Congress. That our disgrace might want no sort of
brightening and burnishing, observe who they were that composed this
famous embassy. My Lord Carlisle is among the first ranks of our
nobility. He is the identical man who, but two years before, had been
put forward, at the opening of a session, in the House of Lords, as the
mover of an haughty and rigorous address against America. He was put in
the front of the embassy of submission. Mr. Eden was taken from the
office of Lord Suffolk, to whom he was then Under-Secretary of
State,--from the office of that Lord Suffolk who but a few weeks before,
in his place in Parliament, did not deign to inquire where a congress of
vagrants was to be found. This Lord Suffolk sent Mr. Eden to find these
vagrants, without knowing where his king's generals were to be found who
were joined in the same commission of supplicating those whom they were
sent to subdue. They enter the capital of America only to abandon it;
and these assertors and representatives of the dignity of England, at
the tail of a flying army, let fly their Parthian shafts of memorials
and remonstrances at random behind them. Their promises and their
offers, their flatteries and their menaces, were all despised; and we
were saved the disgrace of their formal reception only because the
Congress scorned to receive them; whilst the State-house of independent
Philadelphia opened her doors to the public entry of the ambassador of
France. From war and blood we went to submission, and from submission
plunged back again to war and blood, to desolate and be desolated,
without measure, hope, or end. I am a Royalist: I blushed for this
degradation of the crown. I am a Whig: I blushed for the dishonor of
Parliament. I am a true Englishman: I felt to the quick for the
disgrace of England. I am a