allegiance to the rest by promises, which you neither meant nor were
able to fulfil, is both cruel and unmanly: cruel in its effects;
because, unless you can 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