who compose
it, is equally intolerable to British subjects." Chatham next drew a
startling yet not unfaithful picture of the army of General Gage, which
he represented as placed in a dangerous position, as being penned up and
pining in inglorious inactivity, and as being alike an army of impotence
and contempt, as well as of irritation and vexation. He then proceeded
to declare that activity would be even worse than this inglorious
inactivity, and that the first drop of blood shed in this civil and
unnatural war would produce an incurable wound. Chatham next, by a
strange infatuation, extolled the congress of Philadelphia for its
decency, firmness, and wisdom, and even maintained that it was more wise
than the assemblies of ancient Greece! He remarked:--"I must declare and
avow, that in all my reading--and it has been my favourite study, and I
have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of
the world--for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of
conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no
nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general congress at
Philadelphia!" If Chatham did not take this view of the proceedings of
the congress of Philadelphia out of sheer opposition to the existing
administration, which it was his pleasure always to gall and oppose,
then he must have been miserably blinded by the half-speaking papers,
which no man in his senses could misinterpret, and which that congress
had issued. Having passed this strange eulogium on that body, Chatham
next called upon ministers to retract now that they might do it with a
good grace, and asserted that they had derived their information from
wrong sources, from selfish merchants, packers, and factors, and such
servile classes of Americans, whose strength and stamina were not worthy
to be compared with the cultivators of the land, in whose simplicity
of life was to be found the simpleness of virtue, and the integrity of
courage and freedom. He continued: "These true genuine sons of the earth
are invincible. They surround and hem in the mercantile bodies, and if
it were proposed to desert the cause of liberty, they would virtuously
exclaim, 'If trade and slavery are companions, we quit trade; let trade
and slavery seek other shores; they are not for us!' This resistance to
your arbitrary taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious from
the nature of things and of mankind; but above all,