The Crisis VI
Thomas Paine
[An open letter to the Earl of Carlisle, General
Clinton, and William Eden, Esq., British Commissioners at New York;
20 October, 1778]
THERE is a dignity in the warm passions of a Whig, which is never
to be found in the cold malice of a Tory. In the one nature is only
heated- in the other she is poisoned. The instant the former has it
in his power to punish, he feels a disposition to forgive; but the
canine venom of the latter knows no relief but revenge. This general
distinction will, I believe, apply in all cases, and suits as well
the meridian of England as America.
As I presume your last proclamation will undergo the strictures of
other pens, I shall confine my remarks to only a few parts thereof.
All that you have said might have been comprised in half the
compass. It is tedious and unmeaning, and only a repetition of your
former follies, with here and there an offensive aggravation. Your
cargo of pardons will have no market. It is unfashionable to look at
them- even speculation is at an end. They have become a perfect
drug, and no way calculated for the climate.
In the course of your proclamation you say, "The policy as
well as the benevolence of Great Britain have thus far checked the
extremes of war, when they tended to distress a people still
considered as their fellow subjects, and to desolate a country
shortly to become again a source of mutual advantage." What you
mean by "the benevolence of Great Britain" is to me
inconceivable. To put a plain question; do you consider yourselves
men or devils? For until this point is settled, no determinate sense
can be put upon the expression. You have already equalled and in
many cases excelled, the savages of either Indies; and if you have
yet a cruelty in store you must have imported it, unmixed with every
human material, from the original warehouse of hell.
To the interposition of Providence, and her blessings on our
endeavors, and not to British benevolence are we indebted for the
short chain that limits your ravages. Remember you do not, at this
time, command a foot of land on the continent of America. Staten
Island, York Island, a small part of Long Island, and Rhode Island,
circumscribe your power; and even those you hold at the expense of
the West Indies. To avoid a defeat, or prevent a desertion of your
troops, you have taken up your quarters in holes and corners of
inaccessible security; and in order to conceal what every one can
perceive, you now endeavor to impose your weakness upon us for an
act of mercy. If you think to succeed by such shadowy devices, you
are but infants in the political world; you have the A, B, C, of
stratagem yet to learn, and are wholly ignorant of the people you
have to contend with. Like men in a state of intoxication, you
forget that the rest of the world have eyes, and that the same
stupidity which conceals you from yourselves exposes you to their
satire and contempt.
The paragraph which I have quoted, stands as an introduction to the
following: "But when that country [America] professes the
unnatural design, not only of estranging herself from us, but of
mortgaging herself and her resources to our enemies, the whole
contest is changed: and the question is how far Great Britain may,
by every means in her power, destroy or render useless, a connection
contrived for her ruin, and the aggrandizement of France. Under such
circumstances, the laws of self-preservation must direct the conduct
of Britain, and, if the British colonies are to become an accession
to France, will direct her to render that accession of as little
avail as possible to her enemy."
I consider you in this declaration, like madmen biting in the hour
of death. It contains likewise a fraudulent meanness; for, in order
to justify a barbarous conclusion, you have advanced a false
position. The treaty we have formed with France is open, noble, and
generous. It is true policy, founded on sound philosophy, and
neither a surrender or mortgage, as you would scandalously
insinuate. I have seen every article, and speak from positive
knowledge. In France, we have found an affectionate friend and
faithful ally; in Britain, we have found nothing but tyranny,
cruelty, and infidelity.
But the happiness is, that the mischief you threaten, is not in
your power to execute; and if it were, the punishment would return
upon you in a ten-fold degree. The humanity of America has hitherto
restrained her from acts of retaliation, and the affection she
retains for many individuals in England, who have fed, clothed and
comforted her prisoners, has, to the present day, warded off her
resentment, and operated as a screen to the whole. But even these
considerations must cease, when national objects interfere and
oppose them. Repeated aggravations will provoke a retort, and policy
justify the measure. We mean now to take you seriously up upon your
own ground and principle, and as you do, so shall you be done by.
You ought to know, gentlemen, that England and Scotland, are far
more exposed to incendiary desolation than America, in her present
state, can possibly be. We occupy a country, with but few towns, and
whose riches consist in land and annual produce. The two last can
suffer but little, and that only within a very limited compass. In
Britain it is otherwise. Her wealth lies chiefly in cities and large
towns, the depositories of manufactures and fleets of merchantmen.
There is not a nobleman's country seat but may be laid in ashes by a
single person. Your own may probably contribute to the proof: in
short, there is no evil which cannot be returned when you come to
incendiary mischief. The ships in the Thames, may certainly be as
easily set on fire, as the temporary bridge was a few years ago; yet
of that affair no discovery was ever made; and the loss you would
sustain by such an event, executed at a proper season, is
infinitely greater than any you can inflict. The East India House
and the Bank, neither are nor can be secure from this sort of
destruction, and, as Dr. Price justly observes, a fire at the latter
would bankrupt the nation. It has never been the custom of France
and England when at war, to make those havocs on each other, because
the ease with which they could retaliate rendered it as impolitic as
if each had destroyed his own.
But think not, gentlemen, that our distance secures you, or our
invention fails us. We can much easier accomplish such a point than
any nation in Europe. We talk the same language, dress in the same
habit, and appear with the same manners as yourselves. We can pass
from one part of England to another unsuspected; many of us are as
well acquainted with the country as you are, and should you
impolitically provoke us, you will most assuredly lament the effects
of it. Mischiefs of this kind require no army to execute them. The
means are obvious, and the opportunities unguardable. I hold up a
warning to our senses, if you have any left, and "to the
unhappy people likewise, whose affairs are committed to you." I
call not with the rancor of an enemy, but the earnestness of a
friend, on the deluded people of England, lest, between your
blunders and theirs, they sink beneath the evils contrived for us.
"He who lives in a glass house," says a Spanish proverb, "should
never begin throwing stones." This, gentlemen, is exactly your
case, and you must be the most ignorant of mankind, or suppose us
so, not to see on which side the balance of accounts will fall.
There are many other modes of retaliation, which, for several
reasons, I choose not to mention. But be assured of this, that the
instant you put your threat into execution, a counter-blow will
follow it. If you openly profess yourselves savages, it is high time
we should treat you as such, and if nothing but distress can
recover you to reason, to punish will become an office of charity.
While your fleet lay last winter in the Delaware, I offered my
service to the Pennsylvania Navy Board then at Trenton, as one who
would make a party with them, or any four or five gentlemen, on an
expedition down the river to set fire to it, and though it was not
then accepted, nor the thing personally attempted, it is more than
probable that your own folly will provoke a much more ruinous act.
Say not when mischief is done, that you had not warning, and
remember that we do not begin it, but mean to repay it. Thus much
for your savage and impolitic threat.
In another part of your proclamation you say, "But if the
honors of a military life are become the object of the Americans,
let them seek those honors under the banners of their rightful
sovereign, and in fighting the battles of the united British Empire,
against our late mutual and natural enemies." Surely! the union
of absurdity with madness was never marked in more distinguishable
lines than these. Your rightful sovereign, as you call him, may do
well enough for you, who dare not inquire into the humble capacities
of the man; but we, who estimate persons and things by their real
worth, cannot suffer our judgments to be so imposed upon; and unless
it is your wish to see him exposed, it ought to be your endeavor to
keep him out of sight. The less you have to say about him the
better. We have done with him, and that ought to be answer enough.
You have been often told so. Strange! that the answer must be so
often repeated. You go a-begging with your king as with a brat, or
with some unsaleable commodity you were tired of; and though every
body tells you no, no, still you keep hawking him about. But there
is one that will have him in a little time, and as we have no
inclination to disappoint you of a customer, we bid nothing for him.
The impertinent folly of the paragraph that I have just quoted,
deserves no other notice than to be laughed at and thrown by, but
the principle on which it is founded is detestable. We are invited
to submit to a man who has attempted by every cruelty to destroy us,
and to join him in making war against France, who is already at war
against him for our support.
Can Bedlam, in concert with Lucifer, form a more mad and devilish
request? Were it possible a people could sink into such apostacy
they would deserve to be swept from the earth like the inhabitants
of Sodom and Gomorrah. The proposition is an universal affront to
the rank which man holds in the creation, and an indignity to him
who placed him there. It supposes him made up without a spark of
honor, and under no obligation to God or man.
What sort of men or Christians must you suppose the Americans to
be, who, after seeing their most humble petitions insultingly
rejected; the most grievous laws passed to distress them in every
quarter; an undeclared war let loose upon them, and Indians and
negroes invited to the slaughter; who, after seeing their kinsmen
murdered, their fellow citizens starved to death in prisons, and
their houses and property destroyed and burned; who, after the most
serious appeals to heaven, the most solemn abjuration by oath of all
government connected with you, and the most heart-felt pledges and
protestations of faith to each other; and who, after soliciting the
friendship, and entering into alliances with other nations, should
at last break through all these obligations, civil and divine, by
complying with your horrid and infernal proposal. Ought we ever
after to be considered as a part of the human race? Or ought we not
rather to be blotted from the society of mankind, and become a
spectacle of misery to the world? But there is something in
corruption, which, like a jaundiced eye, transfers the color of
itself to the object it looks upon, and sees every thing stained and
impure; for unless you were capable of such conduct yourselves, you
would never have supposed such a character in us. The offer fixes
your infamy. It exhibits you as a nation without faith; with whom
oaths and treaties are considered as trifles, and the breaking them
as the breaking of a bubble. Regard to decency, or to rank, might
have taught you better; or pride inspired you, though virtue could
not. There is not left a step in the degradation of character to
which you can now descend; you have put your foot on the ground
floor, and the key of the dungeon is turned upon you.
That the invitation may want nothing of being a complete monster,
you have thought proper to finish it with an assertion which has no
foundation, either in fact or philosophy; and as Mr. Ferguson, your
secretary, is a man of letters, and has made civil society his
study, and published a treatise on that subject, I address this part
to him.
In the close of the paragraph which I last quoted, France is styled
the "natural enemy" of England, and by way of lugging us
into some strange idea, she is styled "the late mutual and
natural enemy" of both countries. I deny that she ever was the
natural enemy of either; and that there does not exist in nature
such a principle. The expression is an unmeaning barbarism, and
wholly unphilosophical, when applied to beings of the same species,
let their station in the creation be what it may. We have a perfect
idea of a natural enemy when we think of the devil, because the
enmity is perpetual, unalterable and unabateable. It admits, neither
of peace, truce, or treaty; consequently the warfare is eternal, and
therefore it is natural. But man with man cannot arrange in the same
opposition. Their quarrels are accidental and equivocally created.
They become friends or enemies as the change of temper, or the cast
of interest inclines them. The Creator of man did not constitute
them the natural enemy of each other. He has not made any one order
of beings so. Even wolves may quarrel, still they herd together. If
any two nations are so, then must all nations be so, otherwise it is
not nature but custom, and the offence frequently originates with
the accuser. England is as truly the natural enemy of France, as
France is of England, and perhaps more so. Separated from the rest
of Europe, she has contracted an unsocial habit of manners, and
imagines in others the jealousy she creates in herself. Never long
satisfied with peace, she supposes the discontent universal, and
buoyed up with her own importance, conceives herself the only object
pointed at. The expression has been often used, and always with a
fraudulent design; for when the idea of a natural enemy is
conceived, it prevents all other inquiries, and the real cause of
the quarrel is hidden in the universality of the conceit. Men start
at the notion of a natural enemy, and ask no other question. The cry
obtains credit like the alarm of a mad dog, and is one of those kind
of tricks, which, by operating on the common passions, secures their
interest through their folly.
But we, sir, are not to be thus imposed upon. We live in a large
world, and have extended our ideas beyond the limits and prejudices
of an island. We hold out the right hand of friendship to all the
universe, and we conceive that there is a sociality in the manners
of France, which is much better disposed to peace and negotiation
than that of England, and until the latter becomes more civilized,
she cannot expect to live long at peace with any power. Her common
language is vulgar and offensive, and children suck in with their
milk the rudiments of insult - "The arm of Britain! The mighty
arm of Britain! Britain that shakes the earth to its center and its
poles! The scourge of France! The terror of the world! That governs
with a nod, and pours down vengeance like a God." This language
neither makes a nation great or little; but it shows a savageness of
manners, and has a tendency to keep national animosity alive. The
entertainments of the stage are calculated to the same end, and
almost every public exhibition is tinctured with insult. Yet England
is always in dread of France, - terrified at the apprehension of an
invasion, suspicious of being outwitted in a treaty, and privately
cringing though she is publicly offending. Let her, therefore,
reform her manners and do justice, and she will find the idea of a
natural enemy to be only a phantom of her own imagination.
Little did I think, at this period of the war, to see a
proclamation which could promise you no one useful purpose whatever,
and tend only to expose you. One would think that you were just
awakened from a four years' dream, and knew nothing of what had
passed in the interval. Is this a time to be offering pardons, or
renewing the long forgotten subjects of charters and taxation? Is it
worth your while, after every force has failed you, to retreat under
the shelter of argument and persuasion? Or can you think that we,
with nearly half your army prisoners, and in alliance with France,
are to be begged or threatened into submission by a piece of paper?
But as commissioners at a hundred pounds sterling a week each, you
conceive yourselves bound to do something, and the genius of
ill-fortune told you, that you must write.
For my own part, I have not put pen to paper these several months.
Convinced of our superiority by the issue of every campaign, I was
inclined to hope, that that which all the rest of the world now see,
would become visible to you, and therefore felt unwilling to ruffle
your temper by fretting you with repetitions and discoveries. There
have been intervals of hesitation in your conduct, from which it
seemed a pity to disturb you, and a charity to leave you to
yourselves. You have often stopped, as if you intended to think, but
your thoughts have ever been too early or too late.
There was a time when Britain disdained to answer, or even hear a
petition from America. That time is past and she in her turn is
petitioning our acceptance. We now stand on higher ground, and offer
her peace; and the time will come when she, perhaps in vain, will
ask it from us. The latter case is as probable as the former ever
was. She cannot refuse to acknowledge our independence with greater
obstinacy than she before refused to repeal her laws; and if America
alone could bring her to the one, united with France she will reduce
her to the other. There is something in obstinacy which differs from
every other passion; whenever it fails it never recovers, but either
breaks like iron, or crumbles sulkily away like a fractured arch.
Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest; their
suffering and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the
first wound is mortal. You have already begun to give it up, and
you will, from the natural construction of the vice, find yourselves
both obliged and inclined to do so.
If you look back you see nothing but loss and disgrace. If you look
forward the same scene continues, and the close is an impenetrable
gloom. You may plan and execute little mischiefs, but are they worth
the expense they cost you, or will such partial evils have any
effect on the general cause? Your expedition to Egg Harbor, will be
felt at a distance like an attack upon a hen-roost, and expose you
in Europe, with a sort of childish frenzy. Is it worth while to keep
an army to protect you in writing proclamations, or to get once a
year into winter quarters? Possessing yourselves of towns is not
conquest, but convenience, and in which you will one day or other be
trepanned. Your retreat from Philadelphia, was only a timely escape,
and your next expedition may be less fortunate.
It would puzzle all the politicians in the universe to conceive
what you stay for, or why you should have stayed so long. You are
prosecuting a war in which you confess you have neither object nor
hope, and that conquest, could it be effected, would not repay the
charges: in the mean while the rest of your affairs are running to
ruin, and a European war kindling against you. In such a situation,
there is neither doubt nor difficulty; the first rudiments of reason
will determine the choice, for if peace can be procured with more
advantages than even a conquest can be obtained, he must be an idiot
indeed that hesitates.
But you are probably buoyed up by a set of wretched mortals, who,
having deceived themselves, are cringing, with the duplicity of a
spaniel, for a little temporary bread. Those men will tell you just
what you please. It is their interest to amuse, in order to lengthen
out their protection. They study to keep you amongst them for that
very purpose; and in proportion as you disregard their advice, and
grow callous to their complaints, they will stretch into
improbability, and season their flattery the higher. Characters like
these are to be found in every country, and every country will
despise them.
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