“Render then, brave General, this important service to your country! The Colonies can not sustain much longer the unequal strife. Your troops are perishing in misery. They are badly armed, half naked and crying for bread. The efforts of Congress are futile against the languor of the people. Your fields are untilled, trade languishes, learning dies. The neglected education of a whole generation is an irreparable loss to society. Your youth, torn by thousands from their rustic pursuits of useful employments, are mown down by war. Such as survive have lost the vigor of their prime or are maimed in battle; the greater part bring back to their families the idleness and corrupt manners of the camp. Let us put an end to so many calamities; you and ourselves have the same origin, the same language, the same laws. We are inaccessible in our island; and you, the masters of a vast and fertile territory, have no other neighbors than the people of our loyal Colonies. We possess rich establishments in every quarter of the globe, and reign over the fairest portions of Hindustan. The ocean is our home, and we pass across it as a monarch traversing his dominions. From the Northern to the Southern pole, from the East to the West our vessels find everywhere a neighboring harbor belonging to Great Britain. So many islands, so many countries acknowledging our sway, are all ruled by a uniform system that bears on every feature the stamp of liberty, yet it is well adapted to the genius of different nations and various climes. “While the continental powers ruin themselves by war, and are exhausted in erecting the ramparts that separate them from each other, our bulwarks are our ships. They enrich us; they protect us; they provide us as readily with the means of invading our enemies as of succoring our friends. “Beware, then, of breaking forever the link and ties of friendship whose benefits are proven by the experience of a hundred and fifty years. Time gives to human institutions a strength which what is new can only attain in its turn, by the lapse of ages. Royalty itself experiences the need of this useful prestige, and the line that has reigned over us for the past sixty years has been illustrious for ten centuries. “United in equality, we will rule the universe; we will hold it bound, not by arms and violence, but by the ties of commerce,--the lightest and most gentle bonds that human kind can wear.”