ositive
stipulations, have entitled us."

It often happens that when one party, or one that thinks itself a party,
talks much about its rights, it puts those of the other party upon
examining into their own, and such is the effect produced by your
memorial.

A single reading of that memorial will show it is the work of some
person who is not of your people. His acquaintance with the cause,
commencement, progress, and termination of the American revolution,
decides this point; and his making our merits in that revolution the
ground of your claims, as if our merits could become yours, show she
does not understand your situation.

We obtained our rights by calmly understanding principles, and by the
successful event of a long, obstinate, and expensive war. But it is
not incumbent on us to fight the battles of the world for the world's
profit. You are already participating, without any merit or expense in
obtaining it, the blessings of freedom acquired by ourselves; and in
proportion as you become initiated into the principles and practice of
the representative system of government, of which you have yet had no
experience, you will participate more, and finally be partakers of the
whole. You see what mischief ensued in France by the possession of power
before they understood principles. They earned liberty in words, but
not in fact. The writer of this was in France through the whole of
the revolution, and knows the truth of what he speaks; for after
endeavouring to give it principle, he had nearly fallen a victim to its
rage.

There is a great want of judgment in the person who drew up your
memorial. He has mistaken your case, and forgotten his own; and by
trying to court your applause has injured your pretensions. He has
written like a lawyer, straining every point that would please his
client, without studying his advantage. I find no fault with the
composition of the memorial, for it is well written; nor with the
principles of liberty it contains, considered in the abstract. The error
lies in the misapplication of them, and in assuming a ground they have
not a right to stand upon. Instead of their serving you as a ground of
reclamation against us, they change into a satire on yourselves. Why
did you not speak thus when you ought to have spoken it? We fought for
liberty when you stood quiet in slavery.

The author of the memorial injudiciously confounding two distinct
cases together, has spoken as if he was the mem