refusals, too intelligible to have been entangled in evasive subtilties, too legitimate to have been neglected in hostile silence. When their ministers have been sent to us, what has been the aim of their missions? To urge redress for wrongs done to them, shall we again ask? No, the melancholy reverse! for in too many instances they have come to excuse, to palliate, or even to endeavor, in some shape, to rivet those, inflicted by their own sovereigns upon us.

Perhaps the annals of no nation, of the undoubted resources of this, afford a similar instance of encroachments upon its essential rights, for so long a time, without some exertion of the public force to check or to prevent them. The entire amount of property of which, during a space of about twenty years, our citizens have been plundered by the belligerent powers of Europe, would form, could it be ascertained, a curious and perhaps novel record of persevering injustice on the part of nations professing to be at peace. Unless recollection be awakened into effort, we are not ourselves sensible, and it requires at this day some effort to make us so, of the number and magnitude of the injuries that have been heaped upon us. They teach in pathology, that the most violent impressions lose the power of exciting sensation, when applied gradually and continued for a long time. This has been strikingly true in its application to ourselves as a nation. The aggressions, we have received, have made a regular, and the most copious part of our national occurrences, and stand incorporated, under an aspect more prominent than any other, with our annual history. Our state papers have scarcely, since the present government began, touched any other subject; and our statute book will be found to record as well the aggressions themselves as peaceful attempts at their removal, in various fruitless acts of legislative interposition. It may strike, even the best informed, with a momentary surprise when it is mentioned, that for eighteen successive years the official communication

from the head of the executive government to both Houses of Congress, at the opening of the annual sessions, has embraced a reference to some well ascer tained infringement of our rights as an independent state! Where is the parallel of this in the history of any nation holding any other than a rank of permanent weakness or inferiority? As subsequent and superior misfortunes expel the remembrance of those which have gone before, so distinct injuries as we have progressively received them, have continued to engross for their day, our never tiring remonstrances.

Still, it may be said, we have been prosperous and happy! So we have relatively. But we have, assuredly, been abridged of our full and rightful measure of prosperity. Of a nation composed of millions, calamitous, indeed, beyond example, would be its lot, if, in its early stages, the domestic condition of all, or the chief part of its inhabitants was, in any sensible degree, touched with misery or overwhelmed with ruin. This marks the fall of nations. It is not the way in which national misfortunes and an untoward national fate begin to operate. We protest against the principle which inculcates constant submission to wrongs. To ourselves, to our posterity, this is alike due. With what palliation would it be replied to the plunder of a rich man, that enough was left for his comfortable subsistence? If our ships are taken, is it sufficient that our houses are left; if our mariners are seized, is it a boon that our farmers, our mechanics, our laborers are spared; that those who sit behind the barriers of affluence are safe? To what ultimate dangers would not so partial an estimate of the protecting duty open the way? Happily, we trust, the nation, on a scale of more enlarged equity and wiser forecast, has judged and has willed differently. Having essayed its utmost to avert its wrongs by peaceful means, it has determined on appealing to the sword, not on the ground of immediate pressure alone, but on the still higher one that longer submission to them holds out a pros

pect of permanent evil, a prospect rendered certain by the experience we have ourselves acquired, that forbearance for more than twenty years has not only invited a repetition, but an augmentation of trespasses, increasing in bitterness as well as number, increasing in the most flagrant prostrations of justice, presumptuously avowed at length to be devoid of all pretext of moral right, and promulgated as the foundation of a system intended to be as permanent as its elements are depraved.

It is cause of the deepest regret, fellow-citizens, that while we are about to enter upon a conflict with one nation, our multiplied and heavy causes of complaint against another should remain unredressed. It adds to this regret, that, although a last attempt is still depending, the past injustice of the latter nation, wantoning also in rapacity, leaves but the feeblest hope of their satisfactory and peaceful adjustment.

Some there are, who shrink back at the idea of war with Britain! War with the nation from which we sprung, and where still sleep the ashes of our ancestors; whose history is our history, whose firesides are our firesides, whose illustrious names are our boast, whose glory should be our glory! Yes, we feel these truths! We reject the poor definition of country which would limit it to an occupancy of the same little piece of earth! A common stock of ancestry, a kindred face and blood, the links that grow upon a thousand moral and domestic sympathies should indeed reach further, and might once have been made to defy the intermediate roll of an ocean to sunder them apart.

But, who was it that first broke these ties? who was it that first forgot, that put to scorn such generous ties? Let their own historians, their own orators answer. Hear the language of a member of the British house of commons, in the year 1765: "They children planted by your care! No! your oppression planted them in America. They fled from your tyranny

into an uncultivated land, where they were exposed to all the hardships to which human nature is liable; to the savage cruelty of the enemy of the wilderness, a people the most subtle and the most formidable upon the face of the earth: and yet they met all these hardships with pleasure, compared with those they suffered in their own country, where they should have been treated as friends. They nourished by your indulgence? No, they grew by your neglect. When you began to care about them, that care was exercised in sending persons to rule over them, who were the deputies of some deputy, sent to spy out their liberty, to misrepresent their actions, to prey upon their substance; men whose behaviour has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them. They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence; have exerted their valor, amidst their constant and laborious industry, for the defence of a country the interior of which has yielded all its little savings to your enlargement, while its frontier was drenched in blood."* Yes, who was it we ask, first tore such generous sympathies? Let the blood of Concord and of Lexington again answer! Our whole country converted into a field of battle, the bayonet thrust at our bosoms! and for what? for asking only the privileges of Britons ; while they claimed "to bind us in all cases whatsoAgainst all that history teaches, will they charge upon us the crime of rending these ties? They compelled us into a rejection of them all-a rejection to which we were long loth-by their constant exercise of unjust power; by laying upon us the hand of sharp, systematic oppression; by attacking us with fierce vengeance. With the respect, due from faithful

ever.

יי.

* So actively did the American colonies co-operate with Great Britain, in the memorable seven years' war, to which this speech of Colonel Barre alludes, that they are said to have lost nearly thirty thousand of their young men. See Marshall's Life of Washington, vol. 5. p. 85.

subjects, but with the dignity of freemen, did we, with long patience, petition, supplicate, for a removal of our wrongs, new oppressions, insults and hostile troops were our answers!

When Britain shall pass from the stage of nations, it will be, indeed, with her glory, but it will also be with her shame. And, with shame, will her annals in nothing more be loaded than in this. That while in the actual possession of much relative freedom at home, it has been her uniform characteristic to let fall upon the remote subjects of her own empire, an iron hand of harsh and vindictive power.. If, as is alleged in her eulogy, to touch her soil proclaims emancipation to the slave, it is more true, that when her sceptre reaches over that confined limit, it thenceforth, and as it menacingly waves throughout the globe, inverts the rule that would give to her soil this purifying virtue. Witness Scotland, towards whom her treatment, until the union in the last century, was marked, during the longest periods, by perfidious injustice or by rude force, circumventing her liberties, or striving to cut them down with the sword. Witness Ireland, who for five centuries has bled, who, to the present hour, continues to bleed, under the yoke of her galling supremacy; whose miserable victims seem at length to have laid down, subdued and despairing, under the multiplied inflictions of her cruelty and rigor. In vain do her own best statesmen and patriots remonstrate against this unjust career! in vain put forth the annual efforts of their benevolence, their zeal, their eloquence; in vain touch every spring that interest, that humanity, that the maxims of everlasting justice can move, to stay its force and mitigate the fate of Irishmen. Alas, for the persecuted adherents of the cross she leaves no hope! Witness her subject millions in the east, where, in the descriptive language of the greatest of her surviving orators," sacrilege, massacre and perfidy pile up the sombre pyramids of her rc