“They avow, and endeavour to establish, a maxim absolutely inconsistent with our constitution, that ‘an occasion for effectually employing a military force always presents itself, when the civil power is trifled with or insulted;’ and by a fatal and false application of this maxim, they have wantonly and wickedly sacrificed the lives of many of your Majesty’s innocent subjects, and have prostituted your Majesty’s sacred name and authority, to justify, applaud, and recommend their own illegal and bloody actions. “They have screened more than one murderer from punishment, and in its place have unnaturally substituted reward. * * * * * “And after having insulted and defeated the law on different occasions, and by different contrivances, both at home and abroad, they have at length completed their design, by violently wresting from the people the _last sacred right we had left_, the right of election, by the unprecedented seating of a candidate notoriously set up and chosen only by themselves. They have thereby taken from your subjects all hopes of parliamentary redress, and have left us no resource, under God, but in your Majesty. “All this they have been able to effect by corruption; by a scandalous misapplication and embezzlement of the public treasure, and a shameful prostitution of public honours and employments; procuring deficiencies of the civil lists to be made good without examinations; and, instead of punishing, conferring honours on a paymaster, the public defaulter of unaccounted millions. “From an unfeigned sense of the duty we owe to your Majesty, and to our country, we have ventured thus humbly to lay before the throne these great and important truths, which it has been the business of your Ministers to conceal. We most earnestly beseech your Majesty to grant us redress. It is for the purpose of redress alone, and for such occasions as the present, that those great and extensive powers are entrusted to the Crown by the wisdom of that Constitution which your Majesty’s illustrious family was chosen to defend, and which we trust in God it will for ever continue to support.” Of each paragraph given in the foregoing the meaning was conclusive, the instance known to all. There is in this petition no statement exaggerated, no sentiment overcoloured, considering that one paragraph alone describes no less than the suicidal measures which dismembered the empire, and cost the mother country the allegiance of “the colonies,” _i.e._ the continent of America, in these plain words:-- “They [the Grafton administration] have established numberless unconstitutional regulations and taxations in our colonies. They have caused a revenue to be raised in some of them by prerogative.”