The Crisis VIII
Thomas Paine
[An address to the People of England; March, 1780]
TRUSTING (says the king of England in his speech of November last,)
in the divine providence, and in the justice of my cause, I am
firmly resolved to prosecute the war with vigor, and to make every
exertion in order to compel our enemies to equitable terms of peace
and accommodation." To this declaration the United States of
America, and the confederated powers of Europe will reply, if
Britain will have war, she shall have enough of it. Five years have
nearly elapsed since the commencement of hostilities, and every
campaign, by a gradual decay, has lessened your ability to conquer,
without producing a serious thought on your condition or your fate.
Like a prodigal lingering in an habitual consumption, you feel the
relics of life, and mistake them for recovery. New schemes, like new
medicines, have administered fresh hopes, and prolonged the disease
instead of curing it. A change of generals, like a change of
physicians, served only to keep the flattery alive, and furnish new
pretences for new extravagance. "Can Britain fail?" has
been proudly asked at the undertaking of every enterprise; and that
"whatever she wills is fate," has been given with the
solemnity of prophetic confidence; and though the question has been
constantly replied to by disappointment, and the prediction
falsified by misfortune, yet still the insult continued, and your
catalogue of national evils increased therewith. Eager to persuade
the world of her power, she considered destruction as the minister
of greatness, and conceived that the glory of a nation like that of
an [American] Indian, lay in the number of its scalps and the
miseries which it inflicts.
Fire, sword and want, as far as the arms of Britain could extend
them, have been spread with wanton cruelty along the coast of
America; and while you, remote from the scene of suffering, had
nothing to lose and as little to dread, the information reached you
like a tale of antiquity, in which the distance of time defaces the
conception, and changes the severest sorrows into conversable
amusement.
This makes the second paper, addressed perhaps in vain, to the
people of England. That advice should be taken wherever example has
failed, or precept be regarded where warning is ridiculed, is like a
picture of hope resting on despair: but when time shall stamp with
universal currency the facts you have long encountered with a laugh,
and the irresistible evidence of accumulated losses, like the
handwriting on the wall, shall add terror to distress, you will
then, in a conflict of suffering, learn to sympathize with others by
feeling for yourselves.
The triumphant appearance of the combined fleets in the channel and
at your harbor's mouth, and the expedition of Captain Paul Jones, on
the western and eastern coasts of England and Scotland, will, by
placing you in the condition of an endangered country, read to you a
stronger lecture on the calamities of invasion, and bring to your
minds a truer picture of promiscuous distress, than the most
finished rhetoric can describe or the keenest imagination conceive.
Hitherto you have experienced the expenses, but nothing of the
miseries of war. Your disappointments have been accompanied with no
immediate suffering, and your losses came to you only by
intelligence. Like fire at a distance you heard not even the cry;
you felt not the danger, you saw not the confusion. To you every
thing has been foreign but the taxes to support it. You knew not
what it was to be alarmed at midnight with an armed enemy in the
streets. You were strangers to the distressing scene of a family in
flight, and to the thousand restless cares and tender sorrows that
incessantly arose. To see women and children wandering in the
severity of winter, with the broken remains of a well furnished
house, and seeking shelter in every crib and hut, were matters that
you had no conception of. You knew not what it was to stand by and
see your goods chopped for fuel, and your beds ripped to pieces to
make packages for plunder. The misery of others, like a tempestuous
night, added to the pleasures of your own security. You even enjoyed
the storm, by contemplating the difference of conditions, and that
which carried sorrow into the breasts of thousands served but to
heighten in you a species of tranquil pride. Yet these are but the
fainter sufferings of war, when compared with carnage and slaughter,
the miseries of a military hospital, or a town in flames.
The people of America, by anticipating distress, had fortified
their minds against every species you could inflict. They had
resolved to abandon their homes, to resign them to destruction, and
to seek new settlements rather than submit. Thus familiarized to
misfortune, before it arrived, they bore their portion with the less
regret: the justness of their cause was a continual source of
consolation, and the hope of final victory, which never left them,
served to lighten the load and sweeten the cup allotted them to
drink.
But when their troubles shall become yours, and invasion be
transferred upon the invaders, you will have neither their extended
wilderness to fly to, their cause to comfort you, nor their hope to
rest upon. Distress with them was sharpened by no self-reflection.
They had not brought it on themselves. On the contrary, they had by
every proceeding endeavored to avoid it, and had descended even
below the mark of congressional character, to prevent a war. The
national honor or the advantages of independence were matters which,
at the commencement of the dispute, they had never studied, and it
was only at the last moment that the measure was resolved on. Thus
circumstanced, they naturally and conscientiously felt a dependence
upon providence. They had a clear pretension to it, and had they
failed therein, infidelity had gained a triumph.
But your condition is the reverse of theirs. Every thing you suffer
you have sought: nay, had you created mischiefs on purpose to
inherit them, you could not have secured your title by a firmer
deed. The world awakens with no pity it your complaints. You felt
none for others; you deserve none for yourselves. Nature does not
interest herself in cases like yours, but, on the contrary, turns
from them with dislike, and abandons them to punishment. You may now
present memorials to what court you please, but so far as America is
the object, none will listen. The policy of Europe, and the
propensity there in every mind to curb insulting ambition, and bring
cruelty to judgment, are unitedly against you; and where nature and
interest reinforce with each other, the compact is too intimate to
be dissolved.
Make but the case of others your own, and your own theirs, and you
will then have a clear idea of the whole. Had France acted towards
her colonies as you have done, you would have branded her with every
epithet of abhorrence; and had you, like her, stepped in to succor a
struggling people, all Europe must have echoed with your own
applauses. But entangled in the passion of dispute you see it not as
you ought, and form opinions thereon which suit with no interest but
your own. You wonder that America does not rise in union with you to
impose on herself a portion of your taxes and reduce herself to
unconditional submission. You are amazed that the southern powers of
Europe do not assist you in conquering a country which is afterwards
to be turned against themselves; and that the northern ones do not
contribute to reinstate you in America who already enjoy the market
for naval stores by the separation. You seem surprised that Holland
does not pour in her succors to maintain you mistress of the seas,
when her own commerce is suffering by your act of navigation; or
that any country should study her own interest while yours is on the
carpet.
Such excesses of passionate folly, and unjust as well as unwise
resentment, have driven you on, like Pharaoh, to unpitied miseries,
and while the importance of the quarrel shall perpetuate your
disgrace, the flag of America will carry it round the world. The
natural feelings of every rational being will be against you, and
wherever the story shall be told, you will have neither excuse nor
consolation left. With an unsparing hand, and an insatiable mind,
you have desolated the world, to gain dominion and to lose it; and
while, in a frenzy of avarice and ambition, the east and the west
are doomed to tributary bondage, you rapidly earned destruction as
the wages of a nation.
At the thoughts of a war at home, every man amongst you ought to
tremble. The prospect is far more dreadful there than in America.
Here the party that was against the measures of the continent were
in general composed of a kind of neutrals, who added strength to
neither army. There does not exist a being so devoid of sense and
sentiment as to covet "unconditional submission," and
therefore no man in America could be with you in principle. Several
might from a cowardice of mind, prefer it to the hardships and
dangers of opposing it; but the same disposition that gave them such
a choice, unfitted them to act either for or against us. But England
is rent into parties, with equal shares of resolution. The principle
which produced the war divides the nation. Their animosities are in
the highest state of fermentation, and both sides, by a call of the
militia, are in arms. No human foresight can discern, no conclusion
can be formed, what turn a war might take, if once set on foot by an
invasion. She is not now in a fit disposition to make a common cause
of her own affairs, and having no conquests to hope for abroad, and
nothing but expenses arising at home, her everything is staked upon
a defensive combat, and the further she goes the worse she is off.
There are situations that a nation may be in, in which peace or
war, abstracted from every other consideration, may be politically
right or wrong. When nothing can be lost by a war, but what must be
lost without it, war is then the policy of that country; and such
was the situation of America at the commencement of hostilities: but
when no security can be gained by a war, but what may be
accomplished by a peace, the case becomes reversed, and such now is
the situation of England.
That America is beyond the reach of conquest, is a fact which
experience has shown and time confirmed, and this admitted, what, I
ask, is now the object of contention? If there be any honor in
pursuing self-destruction with inflexible passion- if national
suicide be the perfection of national glory, you may, with all the
pride of criminal happiness, expire unenvied and unrivalled. But
when the tumult of war shall cease, and the tempest of present
passions be succeeded by calm reflection, or when those, who,
surviving its fury, shall inherit from you a legacy of debts and
misfortunes, when the yearly revenue scarcely be able to discharge
the interest of the one, and no possible remedy be left for the
other, ideas far different from the present will arise, and embitter
the remembrance of former follies. A mind disarmed of its rage feels
no pleasure in contemplating a frantic quarrel. Sickness of thought,
the sure consequence of conduct like yours, leaves no ability for
enjoyment, no relish for resentment; and though, like a man in a
fit, you feel not the injury of the struggle, nor distinguish
between strength and disease, the weakness will nevertheless be
proportioned to the violence, and the sense of pain increase with
the recovery.
To what persons or to whose system of politics you owe your present
state of wretchedness, is a matter of total indifference to America.
They have contributed, however unwillingly, to set her above
themselves, and she, in the tranquillity of conquest, resigns the
inquiry. The case now is not so properly who began the war, as who
continues it. That there are men in all countries to whom a state of
war is a mine of wealth, is a fact never to be doubted. Characters
like these naturally breed in the putrefaction of distempered times,
and after fattening on the disease, they perish with it, or,
impregnated with the stench, retreat into obscurity.
But there are several erroneous notions to which you likewise owe a
share of your misfortunes, and which, if continued, will only
increase your trouble and your losses. An opinion hangs about the
gentlemen of the minority, that America would relish measures under
their administration, which she would not from the present cabinet.
On this rock Lord Chatham would have split had he gained the helm,
and several of his survivors are steering the same course. Such
distinctions in the infancy of the argument had some degree of
foundation, but they now serve no other purpose than to lengthen out
a war, in which the limits of a dispute, being fixed by the fate of
arms, and guaranteed by treaties, are not to be changed or altered
by trivial circumstances.
The ministry, and many of the minority, sacrifice their time in
disputing on a question with which they have nothing to do, namely,
whether America shall be independent or not. Whereas the only
question that can come under their determination is, whether they
will accede to it or not. They confound a military question with a
political one, and undertake to supply by a vote what they lost by a
battle. Say she shall not be independent, and it will signify as
much as if they voted against a decree of fate, or say that she
shall, and she will be no more independent than before. Questions
which, when determined, cannot be executed, serve only to show the
folly of dispute and the weakness of disputants.
From a long habit of calling America your own, you suppose her
governed by the same prejudices and conceits which govern
yourselves. Because you have set up a particular denomination of
religion to the exclusion of all others, you imagine she must do the
same, and because you, with an unsociable narrowness of mind, have
cherished enmity against France and Spain, you suppose her alliance
must be defective in friendship. Copying her notions of the world
from you, she formerly thought as you instructed, but now feeling
herself free, and the prejudice removed, she thinks and acts upon a
different system. It frequently happens that in proportion as we are
taught to dislike persons and countries, not knowing why, we feel an
ardor of esteem upon the removal of the mistake: it seems as if
something was to be made amends for, and we eagerly give in to every
office of friendship, to atone for the injury of the error.
But, perhaps, there is something in the extent of countries, which,
among the generality of people, insensibly communicates extension of
the mind. The soul of an islander, in its native state, seems
bounded by the foggy confines of the water's edge, and all beyond
affords to him matters only for profit or curiosity, not for
friendship. His island is to him his world, and fixed to that, his
every thing centers in it; while those who are inhabitants of a
continent, by casting their eye over a larger field, take in
likewise a larger intellectual circuit, and thus approaching nearer
to an acquaintance with the universe, their atmosphere of thought is
extended, and their liberality fills a wider space. In short, our
minds seem to be measured by countries when we are men, as they are
by places when we are children, and until something happens to
disentangle us from the prejudice, we serve under it without
perceiving it.
In addition to this, it may be remarked, that men who study any
universal science, the principles of which are universally known, or
admitted, and applied without distinction to the common benefit of
all countries, obtain thereby a larger share of philanthropy than
those who only study national arts and improvements. Natural
philosophy, mathematics and astronomy, carry the mind from the
country to the creation, and give it a fitness suited to the extent.
It was not Newton's honor, neither could it be his pride, that he
was an Englishman, but that he was a philosopher, the heavens had
liberated him from the prejudices of an island, and science had
expanded his soul as boundless as his studies.
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