HKB
with our former happy one, carefully investigate the cause, and industriously seek some means to escape the evils we now feel, and prevent those that we have reason to expect.
We have been so long advancing to our present state, and by such gradations, that perhaps many of us are insensible of our true state and real danger. Should you be told that acts of high treason are flagrant through the country, that a great part of the province is in actual rebellion, would you believe it true? Should you not deem the person asserting it, an enemy to the province? Nay, should you not spurn him from you with indignation? Be calm, my friends; it is necessary to know the worst of a disease, to enable us to provide an effectual remedy. Are not the bands of society cut asunder, and the sanctions that hold man to man, trampled upon? Can any of us recover a debt, or obtain compensation for an injury, by law? Are not many persons, whom once we respected and revered, driven from their homes and families, and forced to fly to the army for protection, for no other reason but their having accepted commissions under our king? Is not civil government dissolved? Some have been made to believe that nothing short of attempting the life of the king, or fighting his troops, can amount to high treason or rebellion. If, reader, you are one of those, apply to an honest lawyer, (if such an one can be found) and enquire what kind of offence it is for a number of men to assemble armed, and forcibly to obstruct the course of justice, even to prevent the king's courts from being held at their stated terms; for a body of people to seize upon the king's provincial revenue; I mean the monies collected by virtue of grants made by the general court to his majesty for the support of his government, within this province; for a body of men to assemble without being called by authority, and to pass governmental acts; or for a number of people to take the militia out of the hands of the king's representative, or to form a new militia, or to raise men and appoint officers for a public purpose, without the order or permission of the king, or his representative; or for a number of men to take to their arms, and march with a professed design of opposing the king's troops; ask, reader, of such a lawyer, what is the crime, and what the punishment; and if, perchance, thou art one that hast been active in these things, and art not insensibility itself, his answer will harrow up thy soul.