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again in the day time, your path through the woods will be ambushed: the darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You are a father-the blood of your sons shall fatten your cornfield: you are a mother-the war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle.

On this subject you need not suspect any deception on your feelings. It is a spectacle of horror, which cannot be overdrawn. If you have nature in your hearts, it will speak a language, compared with which all I have said or can say will be poor and frigid.

Will it be whispered that the treaty has made me a new champion for the protection of the frontiers? It is known that my voice as well as vote have been uniformly given in conformity with the ideas I have expressed. Protection is the right of the frontiers; it is our duty to give it.

Who will accuse me of wandering out of the subject? Who will say that I exaggerate the tendencies of our measures? Will any one answer by a sneer, that all this is idle preaching? Will any one deny, that we are bound, and I would hope to good purpose, by the most solemn sanctions of duty for the vote. we give? Are despots alone to be reproached for unfeeling indifference to the tears and blood of their subjects? Are republicans unresponsible? Have the principles, on which you ground the reproach upon cabinets and kings, no practical influence, no binding force? Are they merely themes of idle declamation, introduced to decorate the morality of a newspaper essay, or to furnish pretty topics of harangue from the windows of that state-house? I trust it is neither too presumptuous nor too late to ask; can you put the dearest interest of society at risk without guilt, and without remorse?

It is vain to offer as an excuse, that public men are not to be reproached for the evils that may happen to ensue from their measures. This is very true, where they are unforeseen or inevitable. Those I have de

picted are not unforeseen; they are so far from inevi-, table, we are going to bring them into being by our vote. We choose the consequences, and become as justly answerable for them as for the measure that we know will produce them.

By rejecting the posts, we light the savage fires, we bind the victims. This day we undertake to render account to the widows and orphans whom our decision will make, to the wretches that will be roasted at the stake, to our country, and I do not deem it too serious to say, to conscience and to God. We are answerable, and if duty be any thing more than a word of imposture, if conscience be not a bugbear, we are preparing to make ourselves as wretched as our country.

There is no mistake in this case, there can be none. Experience has already been the prophet of events, and the cries of our future victims have already reached us. The western inhabitants are not a silent and uncomplaining sacrifice. The voice of humanity issues from the shade of their wilderness. It exclaims, that while one hand is held up to reject this treaty, the other grasps a tomahawk. It summons our imagination. to the scenes that will open. It is no great effort of the imagination to conceive, that events so near are already begun. I can fancy that I listen to the yells of savage vengeance, and the shrieks of torture. Already they seem to sigh in the west wind-already they mingle with every echo from the mountains.

It is not the part of prudence to be inattentive to the tendencies of measures. Where there is any ground to fear that these will be pernicious, wisdom and duty forbid that we should underrate them. If we reject the treaty, will our peace be as safe as if we executed it with good faith? I do honor to the intrepid spirit of those who say it will. It was formerly understood to constitute the excellence of a man's faith to believe without evidence and against it.

But as opinions on this article are changed, and we are called to act for our country, it becomes us to

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explore the dangers that will attend its peace, and to avoid them if we can.

Few of us here, and fewer still in proportion of our constituents, will doubt, that, by rejecting, all those dangers will be aggravated.

The idea of war is treated as a bugbear. This levity is at least unseasonable, and most of all unbecoming some who resort to it.

Who has forgotten the philippics of 1794? The cry then was reparation-no envoy-no treaty-no tedious delays. Now, it seems, the passion subsides, or at least the hurry to satisfy it. Great Britain, say they, will not wage war upon us.

In 1794, it was urged by those, who now say, no war, that if we built frigates, or resisted the piracies of Algiers, we could not expect peace. Now they give excellent comfort truly. Great Britain has seized our vessels and cargoes to the amount of millions; she holds the posts; she interrupts our trade, say they, as a neutral nation; and these gentlemen, formerly so fierce for redress, assure us, in terms of the sweetest consolation, Great Britain will bear all this patiently. But let me ask the late champions of our rights, will our nation bear it? Let others exult because the aggressor will let our wrongs sleep forever. Will it add, it is my duty to ask, to the patience and quiet of our citizens to see their rights abandoned? Will not the disappointment of their hopes, so long patronized by the government, now in the crisis of their being realized, convert all their passions into fury and despair?

Are the posts to remain forever in the possession of Great Britain? Let those who reject them, when the treaty offers them to our hands, say, if they choose, they are of no importance. If they are, will they take them by force? The argument I am urging, would then come to a point. To use force is war. of treaty again is too absurd. Posts and redress must come from voluntary good will, treaty or war.

To talk

The conclusion is plain, if the state of peace shall continue, so will the British possession of the posts.

Look again at this state of things. On the seacoast, vast losses uncompensated: on the frontier, Indian war, actual encroachment on our territory: every where discontent-resentments tenfold more fierce because they will be impotent and humbled: national scorn and abasement.

The disputes of the old treaty of 1783, being left to rankle, will revive the almost extinguished animosities of that period. Wars, in all countries, and most of all in such as are free, arise from the impetuosity of the public feelings. The despotism of Turkey is of ten obliged by clamor, to unsheath the sword. War might perhaps be delayed, but could not be prevented. The causes of it would remain, would be aggravated, would be multiplied, and soon become intolerable. More captures, more impressments would, swell the list of our wrongs, and the current of our rage. I make no calculation of the arts of those, whose employment it has been, on former occasions, to fan the fire. I say nothing of the foreign money and emissaries that might foment the spirit of hostility, because the state of things will naturally run to violence. With less than their former exertion, they would be successful.

Will our government be able to temper and restrain the turbulence of such a crisis? The government, alas, will be in no capacity to govern. A divided people-and divided councils! Shall we cherish the spirit of peace or show the energies of war? Shall we make our adversary afraid of our strength, or dispose him, by the measures of resentment and broken faith, to respect our rights? Do gentlemen rely on the state of peace because both nations will be worse disposed to keep it; because injuries, and insults still harder to endure, will be mutually offered?

Such a state of things will exist, if we should long avoid war, as will be worse than war. Peace without security, accumulation of injury without redress, or the hope of it, resentment against the aggressor, contempt for ourselves, intestine discord and anarchy.

Worse than this need not be apprehended, for if worse could happen, anarchy would bring it. Is this the peace, gentlemen undertake with such fearless confidence to maintain? Is this the station of American dignity, which the high-spirited champions of our national independence and honor could endure-nay, which they are anxious and almost violent to seize for the country? What is there in the treaty, that could humble us so low? Are they the men to swallow their resentments, who so lately were choaking with them. If in the case contemplated by them, it should be peace, I do not hesitate to declare it ought not to

be peace.

Is there any thing in the prospect of the interior state of the country, to encourage us to aggravate the dangers of a war? Would not the shock of that evil produce another, and shake down the feeble and then unbraced structure of our government? Is this a chimera? Is it going off the ground of matter of fact to say, the rejection of the appropriation proceeds upon the doctrine of a civil war of the departments? Two branches have ratified a treaty, and we are going to set it aside. How is this disorder in the machine to be rectified? While it exists, its movements must stop, and when we talk of a remedy, is that any other than the formidable one of a revolutionary interposition of the people? And is this, in the judgment even of my opposers, to execute, to preserve the constitution and the public order? Is this the state of hazard, if not of convulsion, which they can have the courage to contemplate and to brave, or beyond which their penetration can reach and see the issue? They seem to believe, and they act as if they believed, that our union, our peace, our liberty are invulnerable and immortal-as if our happy state was not to be disturbed by our dissensions, and that we are not capable of falling from it by our unworthiness. Some of them have no doubt better nerves and better discernment than mine. They can see the bright aspects and hap

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