keep all
the ground you have marched over, how are you, in the words of your
proclamation, to secure to your proselytes "the enjoyment of their
property?" What is to become either of your new adopted subjects, or
your old friends, the Tories, in Burlington, Bordentown, Trenton, Mount
Holly, and many other places, where you proudly lorded it for a few
days, and then fled with the precipitation of a pursued thief? What, I
say, is to become of those wretches? What is to become of those who went
over to you from this city and State? What more can you say to them than
"shift for yourselves?" Or what more can they hope for than to wander
like vagabonds over the face of the earth? You may now tell them to take
their leave of America, and all that once was theirs. Recommend them,
for consolation, to your master's court; there perhaps they may make
a shift to live on the scraps of some dangling parasite, and choose
companions among thousands like themselves. A traitor is the foulest
fiend on earth.

In a political sense we ought to thank you for thus bequeathing estates
to the continent; we shall soon, at this rate, be able to carry on a war
without expense, and grow rich by the ill policy of Lord Howe, and the
generous defection of the Tories. Had you set your foot into this city,
you would have bestowed estates upon us which we never thought of, by
bringing forth traitors we were unwilling to suspect. But these men,
you'll say, "are his majesty's most faithful subjects;" let that honor,
then, be all their fortune, and let his majesty take them to himself.

I am now thoroughly disgusted with them; they live in ungrateful ease,
and bend their whole minds to mischief. It seems as if God had
given them over to a spirit of infidelity, and that they are open to
conviction in no other line but that of punishment. It is time to have
done with tarring, feathering, carting, and taking securities for their
future good behavior; every sensible man must feel a conscious shame
at seeing a poor fellow hawked for a show about the streets, when it is
known he is only the tool of some principal villain, biassed into his
offence by the force of false reasoning, or bribed thereto, through sad
necessity. We dishonor ourselves by attacking such trifling characters
while greater ones are suffered to escape; 'tis our duty to find
them out, and their proper punishment would be to exile them from the
continent for ever. The circle of them is not so g