There is no declaration you can make, nor promise you can give
that will obtain credit. It is the man and not the apology that is
demanded.
You see yourself pressed on all sides to spare the life of your
own officer, for die he will if you withhold justice. The murder of
Captain Huddy is an offence not to be borne with, and there is no
security which we can have, that such actions or similar ones shall
not be repeated, but by making the punishment fall upon yourselves. To
destroy the last security of captivity, and to take the unarmed, the
unresisting prisoner to private and sportive execution, is carrying
barbarity too high for silence. The evil must be put an end to; and
the choice of persons rests with you. But if your attachment to the
guilty is stronger than to the innocent, you invent a crime that
must destroy your character, and if the cause of your king needs to be
so supported, for ever cease, sir, to torture our remembrance with the
wretched phrases of British honor, British generosity and British
clemency.
From this melancholy circumstance, learn, sir, a lesson of morality.
The refugees are men whom your predecessors have instructed in
wickedness, the better to fit them to their master's purpose. To
make them useful, they have made them vile, and the consequence of
their tutored villany is now descending on the heads of their
encouragers. They have been trained like hounds to the scent of blood,
and cherished in every species of dissolute barbarity. Their ideas
of right and wrong are worn away in the constant habitude of
repeated infamy, till, like men practised in execution, they feel
not the value of another's life.
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