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thing: but the wishes they entertained, the wants they laboured under two months ago, wishes that may have changed, and for the best reasons: wants that may have been relieved, or become unrelievable.—Do they apply to you for justice? Truth is unattainable for want of evidence: You get not a tenth part perhaps of the witnesses you ought to have, and those perhaps only on one side.—Do they ask succours of you? You put yourselves to immense expence: You fit out an armament, and when it arrives, it finds nothing to be done; the party to whom yon send it are either conquerors or conquered.—Do they want subsistence? Before your supply reaches them, they are starved. No negligence could put them in a situation so helpless, as that in which, so long as they continue dependant on you, the nature of things has fixed them, in spite of all your solicitude.
Solicitude did I say? How can they expect any such thing? What care you, or what can you care about them? What do you know about them? What picture can you so much as form to youselves of the country? What conception can you frame to yourselves of manners and modes of life
