Note 134 — Chapter XXXIX

"Had we pursued a wise course, people of our own stock would not have become our rivals in ship-building, in the carriage of our great staples, in the prosecution of the fisheries, and in the production of wheat and other breadstuffs. Nor is this all: we should not have had the hatred, the influence and the talents of persons of Loyalist origin to contend against in the questions which have and may yet come up between us and England.

"Thus, as it seems to me, humanity to the adherents of the Crown, and prudent regard for our own interests, required a general amnesty; as it was, we not only dealt harshly with many, and unjustly with some, but doomed to misery others, whose hearts and hopes had been as true as those of Washington himself. Thus in the divisions of families which everywhere occurred, and which formed one of the most distressing circumstances of the conflict, there were wives and daughters, who, although bound to Loyalists by the holiest ties, had given their sympathies to the right from the beginning, and who now, in the triumph of the cause which had their prayers, went meekly—as woman ever meets a sorrowful lot—into hopeless, interminable exile." (Introductory Historical Essay to Sabine's Sketches of the Loyalists of the American Revolution, pp. 90, 91.)