"If ever any circumstances were capable of recalling to the minds of the people of these Provinces, the most lively remembrance of the cruel situation to which their forefathers found themselves once reduced, under the oppressive yoke of Spanish tyranny, it was, no doubt, that terrible and critical moment, when the Colonies of North America, groaning under the intolerable weight of the chains, with which the boundless ambition of Great Britain had loaded them, were forced into a just and lawful war, to recover the use and enjoyment of that liberty, to which they were entitled by the sacred and unalienable laws of nature. "If ever the citizens of this Republic have had an occasion to remember, with sentiments of the liveliest gratitude, the visible assistance and protection of a Being, who, after having constantly supported them during the course of a long, bloody war, which cost their ancestors eighty years' hard struggles and painful labors, deigned by the strength of his powerful arm to break the odious fetters under which we had so long groaned, and who, from that happy era to the present time, has constantly maintained us in the possession of our precious liberties; if ever the citizens of these Provinces have been bound to remember those unspeakable favors of the Almighty, it was no doubt at that moment when haughty Britain began to feel the effects of divine indignation, and when the vengeance of heaven defeated her sanguinary schemes; it was, when, treading under foot the sacred ties of blood and nature, and meditating the destruction of her own offspring, her arms were everywhere baffled in the most terrible and exemplary manner, her troops defeated, and her armies led into captivity, and at last, that haughty power, humbled by that heaven, which she had provoked, saw the sceptre, which she had usurped, fall from her enfeebled hands; and America, shaking off the cruel yoke, which an unnatural stepmother had endeavored to impose forever upon her, thanked bounteous heaven for her happy deliverance. "If ever the inhabitants of this country, and those of this city in particular, have had a just cause for joy, and good grounds to conceive the highest hopes of prosperity and happiness, it was undoubtedly at that so much wished-for moment, when, with a unanimous voice, the fathers of the country declared the United States of America to be free and independent, and acknowledged your Excellency as Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy of the illustrious Congress.