are, alas, scarcely otherwise to be placed upon a secure and durable basis! It is in vain that the precepts of the moralist, or the maxims of a sublimated reason, are levelled at the inutility, if not the criminality of wars; in vain that eloquence pourtrays, that humanity deplores, the misery they inflict. If the wishes of the philanthropist could be realised, then, indeed, happily for us, happily for the whole human race, they would be banished forever from the world. But while selfishness, ambition, and the lust of plunder, continue to infest the bosoms of the rulers of nations, wars will take place: they always have taken place, and the nation that shall, at this day, hope to shelter itself by standing, in practice, on their abstract impropriety, must expect to see its very foundations assailed assailed by cunning and artifice, or by the burst and fury of those fieree, ungoverned, passions, which its utmost forbearance would not be able to deprecate or appease. It would assuredly fall, and with fatal speed, the victim of its own impracticable virtue.

Thirty years, fellow citizens, is a long time to have been exempt from the calamities of war. Few nations of the world, in any age, have enjoyed so long an exemption. It is a fact that affords, in itself, the most honorable and incontestible proof, that those who have guided the destinies of this, have ardently cherished peace ; for, it is impossible, but that during the lapse of such a period abundant provocation must have presented, had not our government and people been slow to wrath, and almost predetermined against wars. It is a lamentable truth, that during the whole of this period we have been the subjects of unjust treatment at the hands of other nations, and that the constancy of our own forbearance has been followed up by the constant infliction of wrongs upon ourselves. When, let us ask with exultation, when have ambassadors from other countries been sent to our shores to complain of injuries done by the American states? what nation have the American states plundered? what nation have the American states out. raged? upon what rights have the American states trampled? In the pride of justice and of true honor, we answer none; but we have sent forth from ourselves the messengers of peace and concil. iation, again and again, across seas and to distant countries-to ask, carnestly to sue, for a cessation of the injuries done to us. They have gone charged with our well founded complaints, to deprecate the longer practice of unfriendly treatment; to protest, under the sensibility of real suffering, against that course which made the persons and the property of our countrymen the subjeets of rude seizure and rapacious spoliation. These have been the ends they were sent to obtain-ends too fair for protracted refusals, toe intelligible to have been entangled in evasive subtilities, 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 20 years our citizens have been plundered, alternately by one or the other, or by both, of the two great belligerent powers of Europe, would form, could it be ascer tained, 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 strkingly 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 ascertained 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 L.ve 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, i 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 ineulcates 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 or even easy subsistence? If our ships are taken, is it suffieient 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 sward, 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 devold 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 lattey 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 fire sides are our fire, sides, 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 & domestic sympathies should indeed reach farther, and might once have been made to defy the intermediate roll of an ocean to sundhem 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 storians, their own orators answer. Hear the language of a mem

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 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, scat to spy out

their liberty, to misrepresent their actions, to prey upon their sub stanee; men whose behavior 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 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 whatsoever." Against all that history teaches, will they raise upon us the crime of rend-` ing these ties. They compelled us into a rejection of them alla 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 subjects, but with the dignity of freemen, did we, with long patience, petition, supplicate, for a removal of our wrongs, while 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 alledged in her eulogy, to touch her soil proclaims emancipation to the slave, it is more true, that when her sceptre reaches over that confined liarit, 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 eenturies 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,

*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 Marshally Life of Washington, vol. 5, p. 85,

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, inassacre and perfidy pile up the sombre pyramids of her renown." But, all these instances are of her fellow men of merely co-equal, perhaps unknown, descent and blood; co-existing from all time with herself, and making up, only accidentally, a part of her deminion. We ought to have been spared. The otherwise undistinguished rigor of this outstretched sceptre still might have spared as, We were descended from her own loins: bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh; not so much a part of her empire as a part of herself her very self. Towards her own it might have been expected she would relent. When she invaded our homes, she saw her own countenance, heard her own voice, beheld her own altars ! Where was then that pure spirit which 'she now would tell us süstains her amidst self sacrifices in her generous contest for the lib erties of other nations! If it flowed in her nature, here it might have delighted to beam out; here was space for its saving love →→→ the true mother chastens, not destroys the child: but Britain, when she struck at us, struck at her own image, struck too at the immortal principles which her Lockes, her Miltons, and her Sydneys taught! and the fell blow severed us forever as a kindred nation. The crime is purely her own; and upon her, not us, be its consequences and its stain.

In looking at Britain with eyes less prepossessed than we are apt to have, from the circumstance of our ancient connexion with her, we should see, indeed, her common lot of excellence, on which to found esteem, but it would lift the covering from deformities which may well startle and repel. A harshness of individual character, in the general view of it, which is perceived and acknowledged by all Europe; a spirit of unbecoming censure as regards all customs and institutions not their own; a ferocity in some of their characteristics of national manners, pervading their very pastimes, which no other modern people are endued with the blunted sensibility to bear; an universally self-assumed superiority, not innocently manifesting itself in speculative sentiments among themselves, but unamiably indulged when with foreigners of whatever description in their own country, or when they themselves are the temporary sojourners in a foreign country; a code of criminal law that forgets to feel for human frailty, that sports with human misfortune, that has shed more blood in deliberate judicial severity for two centuries past-constantly increasing too in its sanguinary hue-than has ever been sanctioned by the jurisprudence of any ancient or modern nation civilized and refined like herself; the merciless whippings in her army, peculiar to herself alone; the conspicuous commission and freest acknowledgement of vice in ber upper classes; the overweening distinctions shown to opulence and birth, so destruetive of a sound moral sentiment in the nation, so baffling to virtue ;--these are some of the traits that rise up to a