do in our individual capacity,
but with hearts filled with a warm affection to your Majesty, with a
strong attachment to your royal house, and with the most unfeigned
devotion to your true interest, beg leave, at this crisis of your
affairs, in all humility to approach your royal presence.

Whilst we lament the measures adopted by the public councils of the
kingdom, we do not mean to question the legal validity of their
proceedings. We do not desire to appeal from them to any person
whatsoever. We do not dispute the conclusive authority of the bodies in
which we have a place over all their members. We know that it is our
ordinary duty to submit ourselves to the determinations of the majority
in everything, except what regards the just defence of our honor and
reputation. But the situation into which the British empire has been
brought, and the conduct to which we are reluctantly driven in that
situation, we hold ourselves bound by the relation in which we stand
both to the crown and the people clearly to explain to your Majesty and
our country.

We have been called upon in the speech from the throne at the opening of
this session of Parliament, in a manner peculiarly marked, singularly
emphatical, and from a place from whence anything implying censure falls
with no common weight, to concur in unanimous approbation of those
measures which have produced our present distresses and threaten us in
future with others far more grievous. We trust, therefore, that we shall
stand justified in offering to our sovereign and the public our reasons
for persevering inflexibly in our uniform dissent from every part of
those measures. We lament them from an experience of their mischief, as
we originally opposed them from a sure foresight of their unhappy and
inevitable tendency.

We see nothing in the present events in the least degree sufficient to
warrant an alteration in our opinion. We were always steadily averse to
this civil war,--not because we thought it impossible that it should be
attended with victory, but because we were fully persuaded that in such
a contest victory would only vary the mode of our ruin, and by making it
less immediately sensible would render it the more lasting and the more
irretrievable. Experience had but too fully instructed us in the
possibility of the reduction of a free people to slavery by foreign
mercenary armies. But we had an horror of becoming the instruments in a
design, of which, in our tur