own
absolute independence. We honour the sentiments and courage which
prompted them to maintain and defend their liberties; we question not
the purity and patriotism of their motives in declaring independence as
the means of securing those liberties; but we must believe that, had
they maintained the integrity of their professions and positions for
even a twelvemonth longer, they would have achieved all for which they
had contended, would have become a free and happy country, as Canada now
is, beside the mother country and not in antagonism to her, maintaining
inviolate their national life and traditions, instead of forming an
alliance for bloody warfare with their own former and their mother
country's hereditary enemies.

It was unnatural and disgraceful for the British Ministry to employ
German mercenaries and savage Indians to subdue the American colonists
to unconditional obedience; but was it less unnatural for the colonists
themselves to seek and obtain the alliance of the King of France, whose
government was a despotism, and who had for a hundred years sought to
destroy the colonists, had murdered them without mercy, and employed by
high premiums the Indians to butcher and scalp men, women, and children
of the colonists--indeed, to "drive them into the sea," and to
exterminate them from the soil of America? Yet with such enemies of
civil and religious liberty, with such enemies of their own liberties,
and even their existence as Anglo-Saxons, the colonists sought and
obtained an alliance against the mother country, which had effectually,
and at an immense expenditure, defended them against the efforts of both
France and Spain to destroy them. Had the American colonists maintained
the position and professions after 1776, as they had maintained them
before 1776, presenting the contrast of their own integrity and unity
and patriotism to the perfidious counsels, mercenary and un-English
policy of the British Ministry and Parliament, they would have escaped
the disastrous defeats and bloodshed of 1777-8, and would have repeated
the victories which they had gained over the English soldiers in 1775
and the early part of 1776. Unprepared and sadly deficient in arms and
ammunition, they repulsed the regular English soldiers sent against them
at Concord, at Lexington, at Bunker's Hill; they had shut up as
prisoners the largest English army ever sent to New England, and, though
commanded by such generals as Howe and Clinton,