We see nothing in the present events in the least degree sufficient to warrant an alteration in our opinion. We were always steadily averse to this civil war,--not because we thought it impossible that it should be attended with victory, but because we were fully persuaded that in such a contest victory would only vary the mode of our ruin, and by making it less immediately sensible would render it the more lasting and the more irretrievable. Experience had but too fully instructed us in the possibility of the reduction of a free people to slavery by foreign mercenary armies. But we had an horror of becoming the instruments in a design, of which, in our turn, we might become the victims. Knowing the inestimable value of peace, and the contemptible value of what was sought by war, we wished to compose the distractions of our country, not by the use of foreign arms, but by prudent regulations in our own domestic policy. We deplored, as your Majesty has done in your speech from the throne, the disorders which prevail in your empire; but we are convinced that the disorders of the people, in the present time and in the present place, are owing to the usual and natural cause of such disorders at all times and in all places, where such have prevailed,--the misconduct of government;--that they are owing to plans laid in error, pursued with obstinacy, and conducted without wisdom. We cannot attribute so much to the power of faction, at the expense of human nature, as to suppose, that, in any part of the world, a combination of men, few in number, not considerable in rank, of no natural hereditary dependencies, should be able, by the efforts of their policy alone, or the mere exertion of any talents, to bring the people of your American dominions into the disposition which has produced the present troubles. We cannot conceive, that, without some powerful concurring cause, any management should prevail on some millions of people, dispersed over an whole continent, in thirteen provinces, not only unconnected, but, in many particulars of religion, manners, government, and local interest, totally different and adverse, voluntarily to submit themselves to a suspension of all the profits of industry and all the comforts of civil life, added to all the evils of an unequal war, carried on with circumstances of the greatest asperity and rigor. This, Sir, we conceive, could never have happened, but from a general sense of some grievance so radical in its nature and so spreading in its effects as to poison all the ordinary satisfactions of life, to discompose the frame of society, and to convert into fear and hatred that habitual reverence ever paid by mankind to an ancient and venerable government. That grievance is as simple in its nature, and as level to the most ordinary understanding, as it is powerful in affecting the most languid passions: it is-- "AN ATTEMPT MADE TO DISPOSE OF THE PROPERTY OF A WHOLE PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT."