HumanitiesWeb.org - The Crisis (The Crisis No. 6 - To the Earl of Carlisle, General Clinton, and William Eden, Esq., British Commissioners at New York.) by Thomas Paine
The Crisis The Crisis No. 6 - To the Earl of Carlisle, General Clinton, and William Eden, Esq., British Commissioners at New York.
by Thomas Paine
There is a dignity in the warm passions of a Whig, which is never to
be found in the cold malice of a Tory. In the one nature is only
heated- in the other she is poisoned. The instant the former has it
in his power to punish, he feels a disposition to forgive; but the
canine venom of the latter knows no relief but revenge. This general
distinction will, I believe, apply in all cases, and suits as well
the meridian of England as America.
As I presume your last proclamation will undergo the strictures of
other pens, I shall confine my remarks to only a few parts thereof.
All that you have said might have been comprised in half the compass.
It is tedious and unmeaning, and only a repetition of your former
follies, with here and there an offensive aggravation. Your cargo of
pardons will have no market. It is unfashionable to look at them-
even speculation is at an end. They have become a perfect drug, and
no way calculated for the climate.
In the course of your proclamation you say, "The policy as well as
the benevolence of Great Britain have thus far checked the extremes
of war, when they tended to distress a people still considered as
their fellow subjects, and to desolate a country shortly to become
again a source of mutual advantage." What you mean by "the
benevolence of Great Britain" is to me inconceivable. To put a plain
question; do you consider yourselves men or devils? For until this
point is settled, no determinate sense can be put upon the
expression. You have already equalled and in many cases excelled, the
savages of either Indies; and if you have yet a cruelty in store you
must have imported it, unmixed with every human material, from the
original warehouse of hell.
To the interposition of Providence, and her blessings on our
endeavors, and not to British benevolence are we indebted for the
short chain that limits your ravages. Remember you do not, at this
time, command a foot of land on the continent of America. Staten
Island, York Island, a small part of Long Island, and Rhode Island,
circumscribe your power; and even those you hold at the expense of
the West Indies. To avoid a defeat, or prevent a desertion of your
troops, you have taken up your quarters in holes and corners of
inaccessible security; and in order to conceal what every one can
perceive, you now endeavor to impose your weakness upon us for an act
of mercy. If you think to succeed by such shadowy devices, you are
but infants in the political world; you have the A, B, C, of
stratagem yet to learn, and are wholly ignorant of the people you
have to contend with. Like men in a state of intoxication, you forget
that the rest of the world have eyes, and that the same stupidity
which conceals you from yourselves exposes you to their satire and
contempt.
The paragraph which I have quoted, stands as an introduction to the
following: "But when that country [America] professes the unnatural
design, not only of estranging herself from us, but of mortgaging
herself and her resources to our enemies, the whole contest is
changed: and the question is how far Great Britain may, by every
means in her power, destroy or render useless, a connection contrived
for her ruin, and the aggrandizement of France. Under such
circumstances, the laws of self-preservation must direct the conduct
of Britain, and, if the British colonies are to become an accession
to France, will direct her to render that accession of as little
avail as possible to her enemy."
I consider you in this declaration, like madmen biting in the hour of
death. It contains likewise a fraudulent meanness; for, in order to
justify a barbarous conclusion, you have advanced a false position.
The treaty we have formed with France is open, noble, and generous.
It is true policy, founded on sound philosophy, and neither a
surrender or mortgage, as you would scandalously insinuate. I have
seen every article, and speak from positive knowledge. In France, we
have found an affectionate friend and faithful ally; in Britain, we
have found nothing but tyranny, cruelty, and infidelity.
But the happiness is, that the mischief you threaten, is not in your
power to execute; and if it were, the punishment would return upon
you in a ten-fold degree. The humanity of America has hitherto
restrained her from acts of retaliation, and the affection she
retains for many individuals in England, who have fed, clothed and
comforted her prisoners, has, to the present day, warded off her
resentment, and operated as a screen to the whole. But even these
considerations must cease, when national objects interfere and oppose
them. Repeated aggravations will provoke a retort, and policy justify
the measure. We mean now to take you seriously up upon your own
ground and principle, and as you do, so shall you be done by.
You ought to know, gentlemen, that England and Scotland, are far more
exposed to incendiary desolation than America, in her present state,
can possibly be. We occupy a country, with but few towns, and whose
riches consist in land and annual produce. The two last can suffer
but little, and that only within a very limited compass. In Britain
it is otherwise. Her wealth lies chiefly in cities and large towns,
the depositories of manufactures and fleets of merchantmen. There is
not a nobleman's country seat but may be laid in ashes by a single
person. Your own may probably contribute to the proof: in short,
there is no evil which cannot be returned when you come to incendiary
mischief. The ships in the Thames, may certainly be as easily set on
fire, as the temporary bridge was a few years ago; yet of that affair
no discovery was ever made; and the loss you would sustain by such an
event, executed at a proper season, is infinitely greater than any
you can inflict. The East India House and the Bank, neither are nor
can be secure from this sort of destruction, and, as Dr. Price justly
observes, a fire at the latter would bankrupt the nation. It has
never been the custom of France and England when at war, to make
those havocs on each other, because the ease with which they could
retaliate rendered it as impolitic as if each had destroyed his own.
But think not, gentlemen, that our distance secures you, or our
invention fails us. We can much easier accomplish such a point than
any nation in Europe. We talk the same language, dress in the same
habit, and appear with the same manners as yourselves. We can pass
from one part of England to another unsuspected; many of us are as
well acquainted with the country as you are, and should you
impolitically provoke us, you will most assuredly lament the effects
of it. Mischiefs of this kind require no army to execute them. The
means are obvious, and the opportunities unguardable. I hold up a
warning to our senses, if you have any left, and "to the unhappy
people likewise, whose affairs are committed to you."* I call not
with the rancor of an enemy, but the earnestness of a friend, on the
deluded people of England, lest, between your blunders and theirs,
they sink beneath the evils contrived for us.
* General [Sir H.] Clinton's letter to Congress.
"He who lives in a glass house," says a Spanish proverb, "should
never begin throwing stones." This, gentlemen, is exactly your case,
and you must be the most ignorant of mankind, or suppose us so, not
to see on which side the balance of accounts will fall. There are
many other modes of retaliation, which, for several reasons, I choose
not to mention. But be assured of this, that the instant you put your
threat into execution, a counter-blow will follow it. If you openly
profess yourselves savages, it is high time we should treat you as
such, and if nothing but distress can recover you to reason, to
punish will become an office of charity.
While your fleet lay last winter in the Delaware, I offered my
service to the Pennsylvania Navy Board then at Trenton, as one who
would make a party with them, or any four or five gentlemen, on an
expedition down the river to set fire to it, and though it was not
then accepted, nor the thing personally attempted, it is more than
probable that your own folly will provoke a much more ruinous act.
Say not when mischief is done, that you had not warning, and remember
that we do not begin it, but mean to repay it. Thus much for your
savage and impolitic threat.
In another part of your proclamation you say, "But if the honors of a
military life are become the object of the Americans, let them seek
those honors under the banners of their rightful sovereign, and in
fighting the battles of the united British Empire, against our late
mutual and natural enemies." Surely! the union of absurdity with
madness was never marked in more distinguishable lines than these.
Your rightful sovereign, as you call him, may do well enough for you,
who dare not inquire into the humble capacities of the man; but we,
who estimate persons and things by their real worth, cannot suffer
our judgments to be so imposed upon; and unless it is your wish to
see him exposed, it ought to be your endeavor to keep him out of
sight. The less you have to say about him the better. We have done
with him, and that ought to be answer enough. You have been often
told so. Strange! that the answer must be so often repeated. You go
a-begging with your king as with a brat, or with some unsaleable
commodity you were tired of; and though every body tells you no, no,
still you keep hawking him about. But there is one that will have him
in a little time, and as we have no inclination to disappoint you of
a customer, we bid nothing for him.
The impertinent folly of the paragraph that I have just quoted,
deserves no other notice than to be laughed at and thrown by, but the
principle on which it is founded is detestable. We are invited to
submit to a man who has attempted by every cruelty to destroy us, and
to join him in making war against France, who is already at war
against him for our support.
Can Bedlam, in concert with Lucifer, form a more mad and devilish
request? Were it possible a people could sink into such apostacy they
would deserve to be swept from the earth like the inhabitants of
Sodom and Gomorrah. The proposition is an universal affront to the
rank which man holds in the creation, and an indignity to him who
placed him there. It supposes him made up without a spark of honor,
and under no obligation to God or man.
What sort of men or Christians must you suppose the Americans to be,
who, after seeing their most humble petitions insultingly rejected;
the most grievous laws passed to distress them in every quarter; an
undeclared war let loose upon them, and Indians and negroes invited
to the slaughter; who, after seeing their kinsmen murdered, their
fellow citizens starved to death in prisons, and their houses and
property destroyed and burned; who, after the most serious appeals to
heaven, the most solemn abjuration by oath of all government
connected with you, and the most heart-felt pledges and protestations
of faith to each other; and who, after soliciting the friendship, and
entering into alliances with other nations, should at last break
through all these obligations, civil and divine, by complying with
your horrid and infernal proposal. Ought we ever after to be
considered as a part of the human race? Or ought we not rather to be
blotted from the society of mankind, and become a spectacle of misery
to the world? But there is something in corruption, which, like a
jaundiced eye, transfers the color of itself to the object it looks
upon, and sees every thing stained and impure; for unless you were
capable of such conduct yourselves, you would never have supposed
such a character in us. The offer fixes your infamy. It exhibits you
as a nation without faith; with whom oaths and treaties are
considered as trifles, and the breaking them as the breaking of a
bubble. Regard to decency, or to rank, might have taught you better;
or pride inspired you, though virtue could not. There is not left a
step in the degradation of character to which you can now descend;
you have put your foot on the ground floor, and the key of the
dungeon is turned upon you.
That the invitation may want nothing of being a complete monster, you
have thought proper to finish it with an assertion which has no
foundation, either in fact or philosophy; and as Mr. Ferguson, your
secretary, is a man of letters, and has made civil society his study,
and published a treatise on that subject, I address this part to him.
In the close of the paragraph which I last quoted, France is styled
the "natural enemy" of England, and by way of lugging us into some
strange idea, she is styled "the late mutual and natural enemy" of
both countries. I deny that she ever was the natural enemy of either;
and that there does not exist in nature such a principle. The
expression is an unmeaning barbarism, and wholly unphilosophical,
when applied to beings of the same species, let their station in the
creation be what it may. We have a perfect idea of a natural enemy
when we think of the devil, because the enmity is perpetual,
unalterable and unabateable. It admits, neither of peace, truce, or
treaty; consequently the warfare is eternal, and therefore it is
natural. But man with man cannot arrange in the same opposition.
Their quarrels are accidental and equivocally created. They become
friends or enemies as the change of temper, or the cast of interest
inclines them. The Creator of man did not constitute them the natural
enemy of each other. He has not made any one order of beings so. Even
wolves may quarrel, still they herd together. If any two nations are
so, then must all nations be so, otherwise it is not nature but
custom, and the offence frequently originates with the accuser.
England is as truly the natural enemy of France, as France is of
England, and perhaps more so. Separated from the rest of Europe, she
has contracted an unsocial habit of manners, and imagines in others
the jealousy she creates in herself. Never long satisfied with peace,
she supposes the discontent universal, and buoyed up with her own
importance, conceives herself the only object pointed at. The
expression has been often used, and always with a fraudulent design;
for when the idea of a natural enemy is conceived, it prevents all
other inquiries, and the real cause of the quarrel is hidden in the
universality of the conceit. Men start at the notion of a natural
enemy, and ask no other question. The cry obtains credit like the
alarm of a mad dog, and is one of those kind of tricks, which, by
operating on the common passions, secures their interest through
their folly.
But we, sir, are not to be thus imposed upon. We live in a large
world, and have extended our ideas beyond the limits and prejudices
of an island. We hold out the right hand of friendship to all the
universe, and we conceive that there is a sociality in the manners of
France, which is much better disposed to peace and negotiation than
that of England, and until the latter becomes more civilized, she
cannot expect to live long at peace with any power. Her common
language is vulgar and offensive, and children suck in with their
milk the rudiments of insult- "The arm of Britain! The mighty arm of
Britain! Britain that shakes the earth to its center and its poles!
The scourge of France! The terror of the world! That governs with a
nod, and pours down vengeance like a God." This language neither
makes a nation great or little; but it shows a savageness of manners,
and has a tendency to keep national animosity alive. The
entertainments of the stage are calculated to the same end, and
almost every public exhibition is tinctured with insult. Yet England
is always in dread of France,- terrified at the apprehension of an
invasion, suspicious of being outwitted in a treaty, and privately
cringing though she is publicly offending. Let her, therefore, reform
her manners and do justice, and she will find the idea of a natural
enemy to be only a phantom of her own imagination.
Little did I think, at this period of the war, to see a proclamation
which could promise you no one useful purpose whatever, and tend only
to expose you. One would think that you were just awakened from a
four years' dream, and knew nothing of what had passed in the
interval. Is this a time to be offering pardons, or renewing the long
forgotten subjects of charters and taxation? Is it worth your while,
after every force has failed you, to retreat under the shelter of
argument and persuasion? Or can you think that we, with nearly half
your army prisoners, and in alliance with France, are to be begged or
threatened into submission by a piece of paper? But as commissioners
at a hundred pounds sterling a week each, you conceive yourselves
bound to do something, and the genius of ill-fortune told you, that
you must write.
For my own part, I have not put pen to paper these several months.
Convinced of our superiority by the issue of every campaign, I was
inclined to hope, that that which all the rest of the world now see,
would become visible to you, and therefore felt unwilling to ruffle
your temper by fretting you with repetitions and discoveries. There
have been intervals of hesitation in your conduct, from which it
seemed a pity to disturb you, and a charity to leave you to
yourselves. You have often stopped, as if you intended to think, but
your thoughts have ever been too early or too late.
There was a time when Britain disdained to answer, or even hear a
petition from America. That time is past and she in her turn is
petitioning our acceptance. We now stand on higher ground, and offer
her peace; and the time will come when she, perhaps in vain, will ask
it from us. The latter case is as probable as the former ever was.
She cannot refuse to acknowledge our independence with greater
obstinacy than she before refused to repeal her laws; and if America
alone could bring her to the one, united with France she will reduce
her to the other. There is something in obstinacy which differs from
every other passion; whenever it fails it never recovers, but either
breaks like iron, or crumbles sulkily away like a fractured arch.
Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest; their
suffering and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the
first wound is mortal. You have already begun to give it up, and you
will, from the natural construction of the vice, find yourselves both
obliged and inclined to do so.
If you look back you see nothing but loss and disgrace. If you look
forward the same scene continues, and the close is an impenetrable
gloom. You may plan and execute little mischiefs, but are they worth
the expense they cost you, or will such partial evils have any effect
on the general cause? Your expedition to Egg Harbor, will be felt at
a distance like an attack upon a hen-roost, and expose you in Europe,
with a sort of childish frenzy. Is it worth while to keep an army to
protect you in writing proclamations, or to get once a year into
winter quarters? Possessing yourselves of towns is not conquest, but
convenience, and in which you will one day or other be trepanned.
Your retreat from Philadelphia, was only a timely escape, and your
next expedition may be less fortunate.
It would puzzle all the politicians in the universe to conceive what
you stay for, or why you should have stayed so long. You are
prosecuting a war in which you confess you have neither object nor
hope, and that conquest, could it be effected, would not repay the
charges: in the mean while the rest of your affairs are running to
ruin, and a European war kindling against you. In such a situation,
there is neither doubt nor difficulty; the first rudiments of reason
will determine the choice, for if peace can be procured with more
advantages than even a conquest can be obtained, he must be an idiot
indeed that hesitates.
But you are probably buoyed up by a set of wretched mortals, who,
having deceived themselves, are cringing, with the duplicity of a
spaniel, for a little temporary bread. Those men will tell you just
what you please. It is their interest to amuse, in order to lengthen
out their protection. They study to keep you amongst them for that
very purpose; and in proportion as you disregard their advice, and
grow callous to their complaints, they will stretch into
improbability, and season their flattery the higher. Characters like
these are to be found in every country, and every country will
despise them.