“Our prevailing idea is that wealth obtained by extortion to feed the pampered tastes of the few, while the poor may groan in their undeserved poverty and ignorance, is contrary to the dictates of morality, religion and sound political economy.” Then we were interrupted by the excitement caused by a shoal of porpoises racing alongside the steamer. This over, we resumed our seats under the life-boat, and he continued, “The aristocracy favored this taxation, as it would lessen their own contributions to Government. The time serving church, to ingratiate itself with the king, encouraged it. The court was notoriously composed of incapable men and pliable flatterers most suitable to the nature of his majesty. The king, thus encouraged, too arrogant and pig-headed to listen to the few sensible patriots in his realm, took the best possible means—brute force—to alienate the colonists, to compel them to rebel and fight to the death or for independence, ‘a war,’ says an English historian, not American, ‘most disgraceful to a civilized nation. An army with its foreign mercenaries desolating the country, giving no quarter and employing the savages to outrage and massacre helpless women and children.’ “We still have an inheritance left us by that Hessian army, the Hessian fly, that every year attacks our fields of grain and is said to have been brought over by them, a perpetual reminder of those foreign mercenaries. Among the war expenses laid before Parliament was a bill for scalping knives that had been given to the savage fiends and paid for by Christian England for the benefit of her exiled people. “I am not talking at random for some of my ancestral relatives were the victims of those barbarities, and horrible are the recitals handed down to us, one of the survivors being fortunate in living years afterwards, but with a scalp made of other material than that which nature had endowed him. It was a war most unjust, atrocious in its ferocity and horrible cruelties, inflicted upon a people, the kinsmen of the English as they now call us, whose only offense was that they objected to being robbed of their properties and their just rights; to taxation without representation.