THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS. 165 To the people of Britain, they earnestly declared the high value which they attached to a full share in the system of the British constitution, and represented the danger portended to the whole system by the extinction of liberty, its vital principle, in so large and flourishing a department of the empire. «Place us," they said, "in the situation in which we were at the close of the last war, and our former harmony will be restored." The address to their constituents is replete with serious and temperate argument. In this paper, the several causes which had led to the existing state of things were detailed at large, and great care was taken thoroughly to convince their judgments, that their liberties must be destroyed and the security of their property and persons annihilated, by submission to the pretensions of Great Britain. Their greatest object being to unite the people of America, by demonstrating to them the sincerity with which their leaders had sought for reconciliation, on terms compatible with liberty; the conduct of the colonists was contended to have been uniformly moderate, and entirely exempt from blame, while the system of administration was treated as equally dangerous to them all, although it insidiously professed to be particularly aimed at Massachusetts. They stated the measures of commercial resistance which had been recommended, and after having declared their confidence that they would prove efficacious if persisted in with fidelity and virtue, they concluded with saying: "Your own salvation, and that of your posterity, now depends upon yourselves. You have already shown that you entertain a proper sense of the blessings you are striving to retain against the temporary inconvenience you may suffer from a stoppage of trade; you will weigh in the opposite balance the endless miseries you and your descendants must endure from an established arbitrary power; you will not forget the honour of your country, that must, from your behaviour, take its title, in the estimation of the world, to glory or to shame; and you will, with the deepest attention, reflect, that if the peaceable mode of opposition recommended by us be broken and rendered ineffectual, as your cruel and haughty ministerial enemies, from a contemptuous opinion of your firmness, insolently predict will be the case, you must inevitably be reduced to choose either a more dangerous contest, or a final, infamous, and ruinous submission. "Motives thus cogent, arising from the emergency of your unhappy condition, must excite your utmost diligence and zeal to give all possible strength and energy to the pacific measures calcu lated for your relief. But we think ourselves bound in duty to observe to you, that the schemes agitated against these colonies have been so conducted as to render it prudent that you should extend your views to mournful events, and be in all respects prepared for every contingency. Above all things, we earnestly entreat you, with devotion of spirit, penitence of heart, and amendment of life, to humble yourselves, and implore the favour of Almighty God; and we fervently beseech his Divine goodness to take you into his gracious protection." They called upon the Canadians to make common cause with their fellow-colonists, and to elect delegates to the Continental Congress. After directing these several addresses to be distributed, and recommending that another Congress should be held at Philadelphia on the 10th of May following, unless a redress of grievances should, before that time, be obtained, they, on the 26th of October, dissolved their assembly, and the members returned to their respective homes. Shortly after Patrick Henry returned to Virginia, he was asked by a friend, who was the first man in the Congress which had met at Philadelphia. He replied, "If you speak of eloquence, Mr. Rutledge of South Carolina is by far the greatest orator; but if you speak of solid information and sound judgment, Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on that floor.* HE proceedings of this Congress were viewed throughout America with enthusiastic admiration. Though they claimed no authority as a legislative assembly, yet their resolutions were almost unanimously received as the most binding enactments. A thorough conviction of the rectitude of their cause awakened the whole community to the most vigorous exertions. Independent military companies were formed throughout the provinces, and a presentiment of an approaching war spread itself through the length and breadth of the land. The petition from Congress to the king arrived in England, when his majesty was just about to meet a new parliament. In the speech from the throne, he announced, "that a most daring spirit of resistance and disobedience to the laws unhappily prevailed in the colony of Massachusetts;" and, at the same time, intimated the steps which he considered necessary to repress it. A short delay, however, occurred before active measures were * Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry, p. 113. adopted, and hopes began to revive in the breasts of the friends of American liberty. Lord Chatham yet lived. "That splendid orb had not yet set for ever. The Western horizon yet blazed with his descending glory;"* and in the House of Lords, to which he had lately been raised, he once more threw the whole force of his mighty eloquence into the balance of liberty, which was now vibrating fearfully between peace and war. He began by offering a motion that an humble address be presented to his majesty, most humbly advising and beseeching him to withdraw the royal forces from Boston; and he supported his motion by one of the most eloquent and impressive speeches ever delivered in the British parliament. He told the House that in this distracted state of affairs, though bowed down with a cruel disease, he had crawled thither to offer them his best counsel and experience. He urged the necessity of the step he recommended, as the means of opening a way for settling the dangerous troubles in America, by beginning to allay ferments and soften animosities there. He said, an hour now lost might produce years of calamity. * Burke. His object was to put his foot upon the threshold of peace. His present motion was only the introduction to a comprehensive plan; and he pledged himself to the House, that he would not desert, for a moment, the conduct of this mighty business. Unless nailed to his bed by the extremity of sickness, he would give it his unremitted attention; he would knock at the door of a sleeping and confounded ministry, and rouse them to a sense of their imminent danger. He described the situation of the troops at Boston as truly unworthy, being penned up, and pining in inglorious inactivity. He called them an army of impotence and contempt; and to make the folly equal to the disgrace, they were an army of irritation. After stating that the Americans had been abused, misrepresented, and traduced, in the most atrocious manner, in order to give colour, and urge on the most precipitate, unjust, cruel, and vindictive measures that ever disgraced a nation," he asks, "but how have this respectable people behaved under their grievances? With unexampled patience, with unparalleled wisdom. They chose delegates by their free suffrages; no bribery, no corruption, no influence there, my lords. Their representatives meet with the sentiments, and temper, and speak the sense of the continent. For myself, I must avow, that in all my reading and observationand I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master states of the world-I find nothing recorded in antiquity, which, in genuine sagacity, in singular moderation, in solid wisdom, manly spirit, sublime sentiments, and simplicity of language, in every thing respectable and honourable, that can rival the despised Congress of Philadelphia. This wise people speak out. They do not hold the language of slaves; they tell you what they mean. They do not ask you to repeal your laws as a favour; they claim it as a right, they demand it. They tell you they will not submit to them; and I tell you the acts must be repealed; they will be repealed; you cannot enforce them. The ministry are checkmated; they have a move to make on the board; yet not a move, they are ruined. Repeal, therefore, my lords, I say. But bare repeal will not satisfy this enlightened, and spirited people. It is not repealing this or that act of parliament; not the annihilation of a few shreds of parchment, that can restore America to your bosom. You must go through the work— you must declare you have no right to tax-you must repeal her fears and resentments; and you may then hope for her love and gratitude. "The cause of America is the cause of every true Whig. This THE EARL OF CHATHAM. 169 glorious spirit animates three millions of men in our colonies. What shall oppose this spirit, aided by the congenial flame, glowing in the breast of every whig in England, to the amount, I hope, of double the American numbers? Ireland, they have to a man. Nay, what dependence can you have upon your soldiery, the unhappy instruments of your wrath? They are Englishmen, who must feel for the privileges of Englishmen ; and their carrying muskets and bayonets about them surely does not exclude them from the pale of the civil community. Foreign war hangs over your heads, by a slight and brittle thread. France and Spain are watching your conduct, and waiting for the maturity of your errors." HIS animated harangue was concluded in the following emphatic manner. "My lords, if the ministers thus persevere in misadvising the king, he will be undone. He may, indeed, still wear his crown, but, the American jewel out of it, it will not be worth the wearing. I must not say the king is betrayed; but this I will say, the nation is ruined." It was all in vain. The motion of Lord Chatham, though supported by Lord Camden, Lord Shelburne, and the Marquis of Rockingham, was rejected by a large majority. Parliament seemed determined on coercion. The crisis was at hand. On the 9th of February, 1775, a joint address of both houses of parliament was presented to the king, declaring that "a rebellion actually existed in the province of Massachusetts." This was followed by a vote, adding 4400 land troops. and 2000 seamen to the military and naval forces of the kingdom; and this, in close succession, was followed by the passage of an act restraining the commerce of all the colonies, except New York, Delaware, and North Carolina, to Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies, and to prevent them from fishing on the banks of Newfoundland, under certain conditions, and for a limited time. The exceptions in this case may have been designed to create disunion. among the colonies; but it only served to draw them closer together. After this series of coercive measures, Lord North, the premier, surprised the House by a conciliatory proposition. He procured the passage of an act, declaring that parliament would forbear to tax any colony which should tax itself to such an amount as govern |