Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 3.pdf/226
[Lord Amherst], now a noble lord in this House, a long and laborious campaign, to expel five thousand Frenchmen from French America. My lords, you can not conquer America. What is your present situation there? We do not know the worst; but we know that in three campaigns we have done nothing and suffered much. Besides the sufferings, perhaps total loss of the Northern force, the best appointed army that ever took the field, commanded by Sir William Howe, has retired from the American lines.[1] He was obliged to relinquish his attempt, and with great delay and danger to adopt a new and distant plan of operations. We shall soon know, and in any event have reason to lament, what may have happened since.
As to conquest, therefore, my lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, de-
- ↑ In the Burgoyne campaign General Howe, who had been expected to proceed up the Hudson from New York City and join Burgoyne near Albany, went instead to Philadelphia. Through a blunder made in London, he had failed to receive his instructions to join Burgoyne.
216