your Majesty, and to all
civilized nations, from any participation whatever, before or after the
fact, in such unjustifiable and horrid proceedings.

But there is one weighty circumstance which we lament equally with the
causes of the war, and with the modes of carrying it on,--that no
disposition whatsoever towards peace or reconciliation has ever been
shown by those who have directed the public councils of this kingdom,
either before the breaking out of these hostilities or during the
unhappy continuance of them. Every proposition made in your Parliament
to remove the original cause of these troubles, by taking off taxes
obnoxious for their principle or their design, has been
overruled,--every bill brought in for quiet rejected, even on the first
proposition. The petitions of the colonies have not been admitted even
to an hearing. The very possibility of public agency, by which such
petitions could authentically arrive at Parliament, has been evaded and
chicaned away. All the public declarations which indicate anything
resembling a disposition to reconciliation seem to us loose, general,
equivocal, capable of various meanings, or of none; and they are
accordingly construed differently, at different times, by those on whose
recommendation they have been made: being wholly unlike the precision
and stability of public faith, and bearing no mark of that ingenuous
simplicity and native candor and integrity which formerly characterized
the English nation.

Instead of any relaxation of the claim of taxing at the discretion of
Parliament, your ministers have devised a new mode of enforcing that
claim, much more effectual for the oppression of the colonies, though
not for your Majesty's service, both as to the quantity and application,
than any of the former methods; and their mode has been expressly held
out by ministers as a plan not to be departed from by the House of
Commons, and as the very condition on which the legislature is to accept
the dependence of the colonies.

At length, when, after repeated refusals to hear or to conciliate, an
act dissolving your government, by putting your people in America out of
your protection, was passed, your ministers suffered several months to
elapse without affording to them, or to any community or any individual
amongst them, the means of entering into that protection, even on
unconditional submission, contrary to your Majesty's gracious
declaration from the throne, and in direct