Hitherto you have experienced the expenses, but nothing of the
miseries of war. Your disappointments have been accompanied with no
immediate suffering, and your losses came to you only by intelligence.
Like fire at a distance you heard not even the cry; you felt not the
danger, you saw not the confusion. To you every thing has been foreign
but the taxes to support it. You knew not what it was to be alarmed at
midnight with an armed enemy in the streets. You were strangers to the
distressing scene of a family in flight, and to the thousand
restless cares and tender sorrows that incessantly arose. To see women
and children wandering in the severity of winter, with the broken
remains of a well furnished house, and seeking shelter in every crib
and hut, were matters that you had no conception of. You knew not what
it was to stand by and see your goods chopped for fuel, and your
beds ripped to pieces to make packages for plunder. The misery of
others, like a tempestuous night, added to the pleasures of your own
security. You even enjoyed the storm, by contemplating the
difference of conditions, and that which carried sorrow into the
breasts of thousands served but to heighten in you a species of
tranquil pride. Yet these are but the fainter sufferings of war,
when compared with carnage and slaughter, the miseries of a military
hospital, or a town in flames.
The people of America, by anticipating distress, had fortified their
minds against every species you could inflict.
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