"You have ransacked every corner of Lower Saxony; but forty thousand German boors never can conquer ten times the number of British freemen. You may ravage—you cannot conquer; it is impossible: you cannot conquer the Americans. You talk, my Lords, of your friends among them to annihilate the Congress, and of your powerful forces to disperse their army: I might as well talk of driving them before me with this crutch! ...If you conquer them, what then? You cannot make them respect you; you cannot make them wear your cloth: you will plant an invincible hatred in their breasts against you. Coming from the stock they do, they can never respect you..."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandPeople from LondonUniversity of Oxford alumniWhig (British political party) politicians
Original Language: English
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Sources
Speech in the House of Lords (30 May 1777), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (1848), p. 144
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Pitt%2C_1st_Earl_of_Chatham
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William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham
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