Page:Common sense - addressed to the inhabitants of America.djvu/25

Rh I have heard it aerted by ome, that as America hath flourihed under her former connexion with Great-Britain, that the ame connexion is neceary towards her future happines, and will always have the ame effect.—Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument:—We may as well aert, that becaue a child hath thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat; or that the firt twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty. But even this is admitting more than is true, for I anwer, roundly, that America would have flourihed as much, and probably much more, had no European power taken any notice of her. The commerce by which he hath enriched herelf are the necearies of life, and will always have a market while eating is the cutom of Europe.

But he hath protected us, ay ome. That he hath engroed us is true, and defended the Continent at our expence as well as her own is admitted; and he would have defended Turkey from the ame motive, viz. the ake of trade and dominion.

Alas! we have been long led away by ancient prejudices, and made large acrifices to upertition. We have boated the protection of Great-Britain, without conidering that her motive was interet, not attachment; that he did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account, from thoe who had no quarrel againt us on any other account, and who will always be our enemies on the ame account. Let Britain wave her pretenions to the Continent, or the Continent throw off the dependence, and we hould be at peace with France and Spain, were they at war with Britain. The mieries of Hanover lat war ought to warn us againt connexions.

It hath lately been aerted in Parliament, that the Colonies have no relation to each other but through the Parent Country, i. e. that Pennylvania and the Jereys, and o on for the ret, are iter Colonies by the way of England; this is certainly a very round-about way of proving relationhip, but it is the nearet and only true way of proving enemyhip, if I may o call it. France and Spain never were, nor perhaps ever will be, our enemies as Americans, but as our being the ubjects of Great-Britain.

But Britain is the parent country, ay ome. Then the more hame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor avages make war upon their families; wherefore the aertion, if true, turns to her reproach: But it happens not to be true, or only partly o, and the phrae, parent or mother country, hath been jeuitically adopted by the King and his paraites, with a low papitical deign of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weaknes of our minds. Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new World hath been the aylum for the perecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty, from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monter; and