It only now remains to notice the treatment the unfortunate loyalists received from their friends in England and the manner in which the British government--for which they had sacrificed home, friends, and property, and had embraced exile, contempt, and penury--threw them upon the tender mercies of their opponents in the treaty of peace. This surrender of their interests by Lord Shelburne called out, in both Houses of the Parliament, expressions of sympathetic indignation; but the sympathy never took any material shape. Sheridan, in the House of Commons, execrated the treatment of these unfortunate men, “who, without the least notice taken of their civil and religious rights, were handed over as subjects to a power that would not fail to take vengeance on them for their zeal and attachment to the religion and government of the ‘mother country.’” In the House of Lords, Lord Loughborough said, “that neither in ancient nor modern history had there been so shameful a desertion of men who had sacrificed all to their duty and to their reliance upon British faith.” To such charges Lord Shelburne could only reply by a feeble appeal to the mercy of his condemners: “I have but one answer to give the House; it is the answer I give my own bleeding heart. A part must be wounded that the whole of the empire may not perish. If better terms could be had, think you, my lords, that I would not have embraced them? I had but the alternative either to accept the terms proposed or continue the war.”[174] Lord Shelburne’s statement was correct. He had entered upon the negotiations for peace full of sympathy for the loyalists and resolved to make their cause the cause of England; but when, to his attempts to obtain for them the restoration of their property and the abolition of penal laws, was opposed a steady _non possumus_, his enthusiasm for his persecuted fellow-countrymen waned; and when at last it was plainly suggested to him that a year’s prolongation of the war would cost more than all the loyalists’ property put together, he consented to accept the assurance, the futility and emptiness of which was evident upon the face of it, that “Congress shall earnestly recommend” to the several states to repeal the laws of attainder and confiscation which had been passed against the Tories and their property. One of the American negotiators brusquely remarked that it was better and more proper that the loyalists should be compensated by their friends than by their enemies. This desertion of their interests almost broke the hearts of some of the best and most public-spirited of the loyalists, who had given up everything for the cause of their country, and now saw themselves consigned to poverty in their old age, or at the best to supplicating aid of the British government and being exposed to all “the insolence of office and the scorns that patient merit of the unworthy takes.”[175]