The Virginia Gazette

Extract of a letter from Boston.

Our manufacturing scheme was yesterday reported, and met with so universal an approbation that every word and sentiment was received without so much as a syllable's objection. It is so well calculated that it must succeed, for every man who can spare a shilling a year may be interested in it. Scott has brought seven weavers and a wire drawer, and I hear one or more paper makers. Mr. Hancock generously gave the manufacturers their passages.

We are menaced with ships of war, and more troops, to be quartered upon us. What great things these terrifick measures will produce time will discover; but, without pretence to inspiration, I guess Britain's commerce will soonest, and most permanently, feel the injury. We shall hear of sending for the heads of the faction, of laying our towns in ashes, of subduing our republican spirits, and such puerile bombast. But alas! such is our carnal security that we laugh at the rod in the hands of tyrants, who cannot determine what part of an universally discontented people they dare begin to chastise with it.

Let them take it for granted that while ever there continues a general opinion of ill treatment, on one hand, there will be an adequate resentment and disaffection on the other. Harsh usage can only increase, and confirm, a slight aversion into an unbounded detestation. Men born and educated in the principles of their rights and privileges can never resign them quietly, without a bargain of some kind. Nothing of this sort has ever been proposed to the poor Americans: They are to become hewers of wood and drawers of water, barely to divert their kind mother from a trial of her strength in crushing them to pieces; or, what is still more provoking, they and their affectionate brethren in Britain and Ireland are required to bow the knee to a power abhorred and execrated by themselves and ancestors, as long as any trace of Saxon courage can be gleaned from the wastes of antiquity.