implied an acknowledgment of the declaratory act, or, in other words,
of the universal supremacy of Parliament, which as they never intended
to do, it was necessary they should oppose it, in its first stage of
execution.

It is probable, the Abbe has been led into this mistake by perusing
detached pieces in some of the American newspapers; for, in a case
where all were interested, everyone had a right to give his opinion;
and there were many who, with the best intentions, did not chuse the
best, nor indeed the true ground, to defend their cause upon. They
felt themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to
separate, analyze, and arrange the parts.

I am somewhat unwilling to examine too minutely into the whole of this
extraordinary passage of the Abbe, lest I should appear to treat it
with severity; otherwise I could shew, that not a single declaration
is justly founded; for instance, the reviving an obsolete act of the
reign of Henry the Eighth, and fitting it to the Americans, by
authority of which they were to be seized and brought from America to
England, and there imprisoned and tried for any supposed offenses,
was, in the worse sense of the words, _to tear them by the arbitrary
power of Parliament, from the arms of their families and friends, and
drag them not only to dreary but distant dungeons_. Yet this act was
contrived some years before the breaking out of hostilities. And
again, though the blood of martyrs and patriots had not streamed on
the scaffolds, it streamed in the streets, in the massacre of the
inhabitants of Boston, by the British soldiery in the year 1770.

Had the Abbe said that the causes which produced the revolution in
America were originally _different_ from those which produced