2 Benjamin Franklin [1785 
pressive conduct to your subjects, and unjust wars 
on your neighbors? View the long-persisted in, un- 
just monopolizing treatment of Ireland at length 
acknowledged. View the plundering government ex- 
ercised by your merchants in the Indies; the con- 
fiscating war made upon the American colonies: 
and, to say nothing of those upon France and Spain, 
view the late war upon Holland, which was seen by 
impartial Europe in no other light than that of a 
war of rapine and pillage, the hopes of an immense 
and easy prey being its only apparent, and probably 
its true and real, motive and encouragement. 
Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations 
as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as 
much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when 
single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only 
a great gang. After employing your people in rob- 
bing the Dutch, is it strange that, being put out of 
that employ by the peace, they should continue 
robbing, and rob one another? Piraterie, as the 
French call it, or privateering, is the universal bent 
of the English nation, at home or abroad, wherever 
settled. No less than seven hundred privateers 
were, it 1s said, commissioned in the last war! These 
were fitted out by merchants, to prey upon other 
merchants, who had never done them any injury. 
Is there probably any one of those privateering 
merchants of London, who were so ready to rob the 
merchants of Amsterdam, that would not as readily 
plunder another London merchant of the next street, 
if he could do it with the same impunity? The 
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