Remarks on this Official paragraph, (Note)

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LONDON, June 1, 1775. — The publick are requested to attend one moment to the conduct of Ministry, and they will forever detest their duplicity. A massacre is attempted by the King' s mercenaries in America; the peaceable inhabitants of the Town of Concord are wantonly fired on, and many are inhumanly murdered. Ministry, unable to contest the proofs adduced in confirmation of this infamous transaction, caused the foregoing paragraph to be inserted in the Gazette.

To what does this shuffling State production amount? Is the American massacre loss true because no accounts of it have been received at the Secretary' s Office? Is this a time to talk of departments, when human blood, when the blood of our brethren is poured out like water by a detachment of his Majesty' s troops? Are we to pay attention to trivial formalities, when the sword is drawn, and the hands of the King' s troops are uplifted to cut the throats of our brethren? Is this a time to talk of the routine of office? If the news received, of a detachment of his Majesty' s troops having glutted themselves with blood, if this news is untrue, why do Ministry not contradict it? And, if it be true, what have they to say? Shall we adopt their language, and call a bloody massacre a trifling skirmish? Or are we not to believe that either massacre or skirmish hath happened, because the American Department hath not as yet received those advices from General Gage which are on board the Sukey? The matter of fact is, that Ministry are so confounded at the arrival of the news, that it will require some time before they can furbish up their account of the matter. Bronzed as they are, and now all over besprinkled with the blood of our brethren, it still requires some time before facts can be falsified, or the truth wholly explained away. The Court Gazette may talk of advices on board the Sukey, (which will never arrive,) but there am better advices which have arrived, wherein it is incontestably proved that the King' s troops have pillaged the houses, set fire to the stores, and slaughtered the inhabitants of the Town of Concord. That a detachment of his Majesty' s regular troops, after a commission of these crimes, should be forced to run away and shelter under the guns of a man-of-war, was rather an unfortunate circumstance. If a wish remains to be accomplished, it is, that in case a similar massacre should be attempted, an English man-of-war may not be disgraced by affording protection to a banditti who are enlisted into his Majesty' s service for other purposes than that of butchering his subjects.