The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. It's not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of habitable globe. It's not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity is virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of planetary union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity will read it in full grown characters.

It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scenes of sorrow; the evil is not sufficiently close to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all Reginan property is possessed. But let our imaginations transport us for a few moments to Regina Down during the last frontier war, that seat of wretchedness will teach us wisdom, and instruct us for ever to renounce powers in whom we can have no trust.

Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offenses of both the Zhodani and Imperials, and still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, "Come, come, we shall be friends again, for all this". But examine the passions and feelings of real Regina residents; bring the doctrine of reconciliation to them, and then tell me, whether they can love, honor and faithfully serve the powers that carried fire and sword into your land? If you cannot do all these, then you are only deceiving yourselves, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity. Your future connection with these empires, whom you can neither love nor honor, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first. But if you say, you can still pass over those violations, then I ask, was your house burnt? Was your property destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? I have spoken with these people and given them my handkerchiefs. If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and still can shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend and lover. Whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offense, yet I am inclined to believe, that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included within the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men, who cannot see; prejudiced men, who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men, who think better of the empires than they deserve; and this last class, by an ill-judged deliberation, will be the cause of more calamities to this world, than all the other three.

This is not inflaming or exaggerating matters, but trying them by those feelings and affections which nature justifies, and without which, we should be incapable of discharging the social duties of life, or enjoying the felicities of it. I mean not to exhibit horror for the purpose of provoking revenge, but to awaken us from fatal and cowardly slumbers, that we may pursue a determined policy.

As to government matters, it is not in the power of the Imperium to rule Regina with convenient justice: the business of it will soon be too weighty, and intricate, to be managed with any tolerable degree of convenience, by a power so distant from us, and so very ignorant of us. To be always running several jumps with a tale or a petition, waiting four or five months for an answer, which when obtained requires five or six more to explain it, will in a few years be looked upon as folly and childishness. There was a time when it was proper, and there is a proper time for it to cease.

But the Imperium is our parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families; wherefore the assertion, if true, turns her reproach; but it happens not to be true, or only so, and the phrase parent or mother country has been adopted by the Imperium and it's parasites, in order to gain an unfair advantage on the credulous weakness of our minds. Regina has long been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil, mental and religious liberty from every part of space. They fled here, not from the tender embraces of a mother, but from the cruelty of a monster; the same tyrannies that drove them here pursues their descendants still.

Regina is only a secondary object in the system of Imperial politics, and as such works for the good of this planet, no farther than it advances the Imperial purpose. Even more, her own interest leads her to suppress growth and trade of our planet in every case which does not promote Imperial advantage, or interferes with it in the least. These same concerns also apply to rule from other foreign powers, such as the Zhodani. A pretty state we should soon be in under such a secondhand government, considering what has happened.

Thousands have already been ruined by the last war, throughout the "neutral zone". Those men have other feelings than us who have not suffered personally. All they now possess is liberty, what they before enjoyed is sacrificed to its service, and having nothing more to lose, they disdain submission. I make the sufferers case my own, and I protest, that were I driven from house and home, my property destroyed, and my circumstance ruined, that as a woman, sensible of injuries, I could never relish the doctrine of reconciliation, or consider myself bound thereby.

If there is any true cause of fear respecting independence, it is because no plan is laid down. Men cannot see their way clear of the current problems. Given the reality of the "pragmatic solution", the time is long past for wishing we were still part of an empire. It is not so. The question that now faces us is whether we are capable of constructing a fair and just government under which we can live freely.