But there is one weighty circumstance which we lament equally with the causes of the war, and with the modes of carrying it on,--that no disposition whatsoever towards peace or reconciliation has ever been shown by those who have directed the public councils of this kingdom, either before the breaking out of these hostilities or during the unhappy continuance of them. Every proposition made in your Parliament to remove the original cause of these troubles, by taking off taxes obnoxious for their principle or their design, has been overruled,--every bill brought in for quiet rejected, even on the first proposition. The petitions of the colonies have not been admitted even to an hearing. The very possibility of public agency, by which such petitions could authentically arrive at Parliament, has been evaded and chicaned away. All the public declarations which indicate anything resembling a disposition to reconciliation seem to us loose, general, equivocal, capable of various meanings, or of none; and they are accordingly construed differently, at different times, by those on whose recommendation they have been made: being wholly unlike the precision and stability of public faith, and bearing no mark of that ingenuous simplicity and native candor and integrity which formerly characterized the English nation. Instead of any relaxation of the claim of taxing at the discretion of Parliament, your ministers have devised a new mode of enforcing that claim, much more effectual for the oppression of the colonies, though not for your Majesty's service, both as to the quantity and application, than any of the former methods; and their mode has been expressly held out by ministers as a plan not to be departed from by the House of Commons, and as the very condition on which the legislature is to accept the dependence of the colonies. At length, when, after repeated refusals to hear or to conciliate, an act dissolving your government, by putting your people in America out of your protection, was passed, your ministers suffered several months to elapse without affording to them, or to any community or any individual amongst them, the means of entering into that protection, even on unconditional submission, contrary to your Majesty's gracious declaration from the throne, and in direct violation of the public faith. We cannot, therefore, agree to unite in new severities against the brethren of our blood for their asserting an independency, to which we know, in our conscience, they have been necessitated by the conduct of those very persons who now make use of that argument to provoke us to a continuance and repetition of the acts which in a regular series have led to this great misfortune.