they might call our respective interests.  But I trust it would not be for our mutual satisfaction.  Your “earnest desire to stop the effusion of blood and the calamities of war” will therefore lead you, on maturer reflection, to reprobate a plan teeming with discord, and which, in the space of twenty years, would produce another wild expedition across the Atlantic, and in a few years more some such commission as that “with which his Majesty hath been pleased to honor you.”  We cannot but admire the generosity of soul which prompts you “to agree that no military force shall be kept up in the different States of North America without the consent of the General Congress or particular Assemblies.”  The only grateful return we can make for this exemplary condescension is, to assure your Excellencies, and, on behalf of my countrymen, I do most solemnly promise and assure you, that no military force shall be kept up in the different States of North America without the consent of the General Congress and that of the Legislatures of those States.  You will, therefore, cause the forces of your royal master to be removed; for I can venture to assure you that the Congress have not consented, and probably will not consent, that they be kept up.

You have also made the unsolicited offer of concurring “in measures calculated to discharge the debts of America, and to raise the credit and value of the paper circulation.”  If your Excellencies mean by this to apply for offices in the department of our finance, I am to assure you (which I do with “perfect respect”) that it will be necessary to procure very ample recommendations.  For, as the English have not yet pursued measures to discharge their own debt and raise the credit and value of their own paper circulation, but, on the contrary, are in a fair way to increase the one and absolutely destroy the other, you will instantly perceive that financiers from that nation would present themselves with the most awkward grace imaginable.

You propose to us a device to “perpetuate our union.”  It might not be amiss previously to establish this union, which may be done by your acceptance of the treaty of peace and commerce tendered to you by Congress.  And such treaty I can venture to say would continue as long as your ministers could prevail upon themselves not to violate the faith of nations.

You offer, to use your language, the inaccuracy of which, considering the importance of the subject, is not to be wondered at, or at least may be excused, “in short, to establish the powers of the respective Legislatures in each particular State, to settle its revenue, its civil and military establishment, and to exercise a perfect freedom of legislation and internal government, so that the British States throughout North America, acting with us in peace and war, under one common sovereign, may have the irrevocable enjoyment of every privilege that is short of a total separation of interests, or consistent with that total union