n petitioners? Or where is the war on which
a world was staked till now?

We may not, perhaps, be wise enough to make all the advantages we ought
of our independence; but they are, nevertheless, marked and presented
to us with every character of great and good, and worthy the hand of
him who sent them. I look through the present trouble to a time of
tranquillity, when we shall have it in our power to set an example of
peace to all the world. Were the Quakers really impressed and influenced
by the quiet principles they profess to hold, they would, however
they might disapprove the means, be the first of all men to approve of
independence, because, by separating ourselves from the cities of Sodom
and Gomorrah, it affords an opportunity never given to man before of
carrying their favourite principle of peace into general practice, by
establishing governments that shall hereafter exist without wars. O! ye
fallen, cringing, priest-and-Pemberton-ridden people! What more can we
say of ye than that a religious Quaker is a valuable character, and a
political Quaker a real Jesuit.

Having thus gone over some of the principal points in support of
independence, I must now request the reader to return back with me to
the period when it first began to be a public doctrine, and to examine
the progress it has made among the various classes of men. The area I
mean to begin at, is the breaking out of hostilities, April 19th, 1775.
Until this event happened, the continent seemed to view the dispute as
a kind of law-suit for a matter of right, litigating between the old
country and the new; and she felt the same kind and degree of horror,
as if she had seen an oppressive plaintiff, at the head of a band of
ruffians, enter the court, while the cause was before it, and put the
judge, the jury, the defendant and his counsel, to the sword. Perhaps a
more heart-felt convulsion never reached a country with the same
degree of power and rapidity before, and never may again. Pity for the
sufferers, mixed with indignation at the violence, and heightened with
apprehensions of undergoing the same fate, made the affair of Lexington
the affair of the continent. Every part of it felt the shock, and all
vibrated together. A general promotion of sentiment took place: those
who had drank deeply into Whiggish principles, that is, the right and
necessity not only of opposing, but wholly setting aside the power of
the crown as soon as it became practically da