Resistance to your acts was necessary
as it was just; and your vain declaration of the omnipotence of
parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of
submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or enslave your
fellow-subjects in America, who feel that tyranny, whether ambitioned by
an individual part, of the legislature or by the bodies who compose
it, is equally intolerable to British subjects." Chatham next drew a
startling yet not unfaithful picture of the army of General Gage, which
he represented as placed in a dangerous position, as being penned up and
pining in inglorious inactivity, and as being alike an army of impotence
and contempt, as well as of irritation and vexation. He then proceeded
to declare that activity would be even worse than this inglorious
inactivity, and that the first drop of blood shed in this civil and
unnatural war would produce an incurable wound. Chatham next, by a
strange infatuation, extolled the congress of Philadelphia for its
decency, firmness, and wisdom, and even maintained that it was more wise
than the assemblies of ancient Greece! He remarked:--"I must declare and
avow, that in all my reading--and it has been my favourite study, and I
have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of
the world--for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of
conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no
nation or body of men can stand in preference to the general congress at
Philadelphia!" If Chatham did not take this view of the proceedings of
the congress of Philadelphia out of sheer opposition to the existing
administration, which it was his pleasure always to gall and oppose,
then he must have been miserably blinded by the half-speaking papers,
which no man in his senses could misinterpret, and which that congress
had issued.
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