What foolishness then to seek reconciliation, even if it were possible! Reconciliation at this stage would be the ruin of America. If King George were indeed clever, he would eagerly repeal all the obnoxious acts and make every concession; for when the colonies had once become reconciled he could accomplish by "craft and subtlety, in the long run, what he cannot do by force and violence in the short one." The colonies, having come to maturity, cannot always remain subject to tutelage; like the youth who has reached his majority, they must sooner or later go their own way. Why not now? Beware of reconciliation and of all those who advocate it, for they are either "interested men, who are not to be trusted, weak men who cannot see, prejudiced men who will not see, or a certain set of moderate men who think better of the European world than it deserves." Such arguments were indeed precisely suited to convince men that independence, so far from being an event in which they had become entangled by the fatal network of circumstance, was an event which they freely willed. "Read by almost every American, and recommended as a work replete with truth, against which none but the partial and prejudiced can form any objection, ... it satisfied multitudes that it is their true interest immediately to cut the Gordian knot by which the ... colonists have been bound to Great Britain, and to open their commerce, as an independent people, to all the nations of the world." In April and May, after the Congress had opened the ports, the tide set strongly and irresistibly in the direction of the formal declaration. "Every post and every day rolls in upon us," John Adams said, "Independence like a torrent." It was on the 7th of June that Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegation and in obedience to the instructions from the Virginia Convention, moved "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States ...; that it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances; ... and that a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation."