I do not doubt that the gentlemen present will
each of them address themselves to the subject, which, I think, the
resolutions have the merit of fairly launching, in a spirit of
patriotism, always keeping in view the welfare, the prosperity, the
united strength, and the ultimate glory of our common country.
_March 13th._ I am aware that outside these walls, at any rate, there is
a feeling that we ought to wait; that the time has not yet come. I can
only repeat what I have said in other places. If we miss this particular
opportunity, every year that rolls over us will make the difficulties
greater; these difficulties which our separate existence have imposed
will go on increasing. They can only have one crop of fruit; they can
only produce antipathy, disunion, aggression, reprisal, wide-spread
discontent, and, if they are suffered to go on, civil war. That is a
prospect which no man of just mind can contemplate--that these colonies,
sprung from the same stock, possessing the same great inheritance of
equal laws and all the riches of science which have been achieved and
stored up for us in the mother country--that we, side by side, instead
of living in brotherhood and amity, should live in constant irritation
and hostility.
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