Recommend them, for
consolation, to your master's court; there perhaps they may make a
shift to live on the scraps of some dangling parasite, and choose
companions among thousands like themselves. A traitor is the foulest
fiend on earth.
In a political sense we ought to thank you for thus bequeathing
estates to the continent; we shall soon, at this rate, be able to
carry on a war without expense, and grow rich by the ill policy of
Lord Howe, and the generous defection of the Tories. Had you set
your foot into this city, you would have bestowed estates upon us
which we never thought of, by bringing forth traitors we were
unwilling to suspect. But these men, you'll say, "are his majesty's
most faithful subjects;" let that honor, then, be all their fortune,
and let his majesty take them to himself.
I am now thoroughly disgusted with them; they live in ungrateful
ease, and bend their whole minds to mischief. It seems as if God had
given them over to a spirit of infidelity, and that they are open to
conviction in no other line but that of punishment. It is time to have
done with tarring, feathering, carting, and taking securities for
their future good behavior; every sensible man must feel a conscious
shame at seeing a poor fellow hawked for a show about the streets,
when it is known he is only the tool of some principal villain,
biassed into his offence by the force of false reasoning, or bribed
thereto, through sad necessity. We dishonor ourselves by attacking
such trifling characters while greater ones are suffered to escape;
'tis our duty to find them out, and their proper punishment would be
to exile them from the continent for ever.
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