Must I be called a parricide, a traitor, a villain, lose
the esteem of all those whom I love, to preserve my own; be shunned
like a rattlesnake, or be pointed at like a bear?
I have neither
heroism not magnanimity enough to make so great a sacrifice. Here I
am tied, I am fastened by numerous strings, nor do I repine at the
pressure they cause; ignorant as I am, I can pervade the utmost
extent of the calamities which have already overtaken our poor
afflicted country. I can see the great and accumulated ruin yet
extending itself as far as the theatre of war has reached; I hear
the groans of thousands of families now ruined and desolated by our
aggressors. I cannot count the multitude of orphans this war has
made; nor ascertain the immensity of blood we have lost. Some have
asked, whether it was a crime to resist; to repel some parts of this
evil. Others have asserted, that a resistance so general makes
pardon unattainable, and repentance useless: and dividing the crime
among so many, renders it imperceptible. What one party calls
meritorious, the other denominates flagitious. These opinions vary,
contract, or expand, like the events of the war on which they are
founded. What can an insignificant man do in the midst of these
jarring contradictory parties, equally hostile to persons situated
as I am? And after all who will be the really guilty? - Those most
certainly who fail of success. Our fate, the fate of thousands, is
then necessarily involved in the dark wheel of fortune. Why then so
many useless reasonings; we are the sport of fate. Farewell
education, principles, love of our country, farewell; all are become
useless to the generality of us: he who governs himself according to
what he calls his principles, may be punished either by one party or
the other, for those very principles. He who proceeds without
principle, as chance, timidity, or self-preservation directs, will
not perhaps fare better; but he will be less blamed. What are we in
the great scale of events, we poor defenceless frontier inhabitants?
What is it to the gazing world, whether we breathe or whether we
die? Whatever virtue, whatever merit and disinterestedness we may
exhibit in our secluded retreats, of what avail?
We are like the pismires destroyed by the plough; whose destruction
prevents not the future crop. Self-preservation, therefore, the rule
of nature, seems to be the best rule of conduct; what good can we do
by vain resistance, by useless efforts? The cool, the distant
spectator, placed in safety, may arraign me for ingratitude, may
bring forth the principles of Solon or Montesquieu; he may look on
me as wilfully guilty; he may call me by the most opprobrious names.
Secure from personal danger, his warm imagination, undisturbed by
the least agitation of the heart, will expatiate freely on this
grand question; and will consider this extended field, but as
exhibiting the double scene of attack and defence. To him the object
becomes abstracted, the intermediate glares, the perspective
distance and a variety of opinions unimpaired by affections,
presents to his mind but one set of ideas. Here he proclaims the
high guilt of the one, and there the right of the other; but let him
come and reside with us one single month, let him pass with us
through all the successive hours of necessary toil, terror and
affright, let him watch with us, his musket in his hand, through
tedious, sleepless nights, his imagination furrowed by the keen
chisel of every passion; let his wife and his children become
exposed to the most dreadful hazards of death; let the existence of
his property depend on a single spark, blown by the breath of an
enemy; let him tremble with us in our fields, shudder at the
rustling of every leaf; let his heart, the seat of the most
affecting passions, be powerfully wrung by hearing the melancholy
end of his relations and friends; let him trace on the map the
progress of these desolations; let his alarmed imagination predict
to him the night, the dreadful night when it may be his turn to
perish, as so many have perished before. Observe then, whether the
man will not get the better of the citizen, whether his political
maxims will not vanish! Yes, he will cease to glow so warmly with
the glory of the metropolis; all his wishes will be turned toward
the preservation of his family! Oh, were he situated where I am,
were his house perpetually filled, as mine is, with miserable
victims just escaped from the flames and the scalping knife, telling
of barbarities and murders that make human nature tremble; his
situation would suspend every political reflection, and expel every
abstract idea. My heart is full and involuntarily takes hold of any
notion from whence it can receive ideal ease or relief. I am
informed that the king has the most numerous, as well as the
fairest, progeny of children, of any potentate now in the world: he
may be a great king, but he must feel as we common mortals do, in
the good wishes he forms for their lives and prosperity. His mind no
doubt often springs forward on the wings of anticipation, and
contemplates us as happily settled in the world. If a poor frontier
inhabitant may be allowed to suppose this great personage the first
in our system, to be exposed but for one hour, to the exquisite
pangs we so often feel, would not the preservation of so numerous a
family engross all his thoughts; would not the ideas of dominion and
other felicities attendant on royalty all vanish in the hour of
danger? The regal character, however sacred, would be superseded by
the stronger, because more natural one of man and father. Oh! did he
but know the circumstances of this horrid war, I am sure he would
put a stop to that long destruction of parents and children.
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