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the rewards of our care, can properly be called our own, so long it will be worth our while to be industrious and frugal. But if when we plow---sow---reap---gather---and thresh---we find, that we plow---sow---reap---gather---and thresh for others, whose pleasure is to be the sole limitation how much they shall take, and how much they shall leave, why should we repeat the unprofitable toil? Horses and oxen are content with that portion of the fruits of their work, which their owners assign them, in order to keep them strong enough to raise successive crops; but even these beasts will not submit to draw for their masters, until they are subdued by whips and goads.
Let us take care of our rights, and we therein take care of our prosperity. [1]“Slavery is ever preceded by sleep.” Individuals may be dependent on ministers, if they please. States should scorn it;----and if you are not wanting to yourselves, you will have a proper regard paid you by those, to whom if you are not respectable, you will be contemptible. But---------------if we have already forgot the reasons that urged us, with unexampled unanimity, to exert ourselves two years ago----if our zeal for the public good is worn out before the homespun cloaths, which it caused us to have made----if our resolutions are so faint, as by our present conduct to condemn our own late successful example---if we are not affected by any reverence for the memory of our ancestors, who transmitted to us that freedom in which they had been blest-----if we are not animated by any regard for posterity, to whom, by the most sacred obligations, we are bound to deliver down the invaluable inheritance----then, indeed, any minister----or any tool of a minister----or any creature of a tool of a minister----or any lower [2]instrument of [3]administration, if lower there be, is a personage whom it may be dangerous to offend.
- ↑ Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, Book 14, Chap. 13.
- ↑ “Instrumenta regni.” Tacitus’s Ann. Book 12, § 66.
- ↑ If any person shall imagine that he discovers, in these letters, the least dislike of the dependence of these colonies on Great-Britain, I beg that such person will not form any judgment on particular expressions, but will consider the tenor of all the letters taken together. In that case, I flatter myself, that every unprejudiced reader will be convinced, that the true interests of Great-Britain are as dear to me, as they ought to be to every good subject.
If I am an Enthusiast in any thing, it is in my zeal for the perpetual dependence of these colonies on their mother country.---A dependence founded on mutual benefits, the continuance of which can be secured only by mutual affections. Therefore it is, that with extreme apprehension I view the smallest seeds of discontent, which are unwarily scattered abroad. Fifty or Sixty years will make astonishing alterations in these colonies; and this consideration should render it the business of Great-Britain more and more to cultivate our good dispositions towards her: But the misfortune is, that those great men, who are wrestling for power at home, think themselves very slightly interested in the prosperity of their country Fifty or Sixty years hence, but are deeply concerned in blowing up a popular clamor for supposed immediate advantages.
