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 dangerous (for in theory
it was always so), stepped into the first stage of independence;
while another class of Whigs, equally sound in principle, but not so