Have They
Forgot The Conduct Of The Belligerent Powers At The Siege Of Dresden At The
Same Epoch, When Whole
Families, among whom were helpless old men and women
with children at the breast, were compelled to leave Dresden in
The middle
of a most rigorous winter and were driven to take refuge in the fields
where the most of them perished with hunger and cold; and where many
individuals lost their reason and became insane from the treatment they
received? Have they forgotten the merciless barbarities inflicted by the
Russians in the same war on the inhabitants of the Prussian territory?
their ripping up and burning men, women, and children? and the dreadful
retaliation inflicted on them at the battle of Zorndorff, when the
Prussians, exasperated at the idea of those horrors so fresh in their
memory, on being ordered to bury the Russian dead, threw the wounded men
also belonging to that nation into the graves dug for the dead, to be thus
buried alive, and hastily filled them up with earth, as if fearful that
they might relent, did they give themselves time for reflection? These are
not exaggerations; they are given by an author celebrated for his
impartiality and deep research and who was an eye-witness of many of these
proceedings; I mean Archenholz in his admirable history of the Seven Years'
war.[33]
Then again in the war of American Independence (and here my countrymen must
excuse me if I point out the acts of injustice committed by them, when
acting in obedience to an unprincipled and arbitrary government and in a
cause hostile to freedom), who does not recollect the private property
wantonly destroyed and confiscated by the English?
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