17501 Essays , 
unless we “make conquests for them,” and reduce 
Canada to gratify their “vain ambition,” &c. It 
will not be a conquest for them, nor gratify any vain 
ambition of theirs. It will be a conquest for the 
whole; and all our people will, in the increase of 
trade and the ease of taxes, find the advantage of it. 
Should we be obliged at any time to make a war 
for the protection of our commerce, and to secure the 
exportation of our manufactures, would it be fair to 
represent such a war merely as blood and treasure 
spent in the cause of the weavers of Yorkshire, Nor- 
wich, or the West, the cuttlers of Sheffield, or the 
button-makers of Birmingham? I hope it will ap- 
pear, before I end these sheets, that if ever there 
was a national war, this is truly such a one; a war 
in which the interest of the whole nation is directly 
and fundamentally concerned. Those who would 
be thought deeply skilled in human nature affect to 
discover self-interested views everywhere, at the 
bottom of the fairest, the most generous conduct. 
Suspicions and charges of this kind meet with ready 
reception and belief in the minds even of the multi- 
tude, and therefore less acuteness and address than 
the Remarker is possessed of would be sufficient to 
persuade the nation generally that all the zeal and 
spirit manifested and exerted by the colonies in this 
war was only in “their own cause,” to “make con- 
quest for themselves,” to engage us to make more 
for them, to gratify their own “vain ambition.” 
But should they now humbly address the mother 
country in the terms and the sentiments of the Re- 
marker; return her their grateful acknowledgments 
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