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called upon to sacrifice this necessary branch of your navigation and the great agricultural interest, whose handmaid it is, to jeopard your best interest for a circuitous commerce, for the fraudulent protection of belligerant property under your neutral flag. Will you be goaded by the dreaming calculation of insatiate avarice to stake your all for the protection of this trade? I do not speak of the probable effects of war on the price of our produce. Severely as we must feel, we may scuffle through it. I speak of its reaction on the constitution. You may go to war for this excrescence of the carrying trade-and make peace at the expense of the constitution. Your executive will lord it over you, and you must make the best terms with the conqueror that you can. But the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Gregg) tells you that he is for acting in this, as in all things, uninfluenced by the opinion of any minister whatever-foreign, or, I presume, domestic. On this point I am ready to meet the gentleman, am unwilling as he can be, to be dictated to by any minister at home or abroad. Is he willing to act on the same independent footing? I have before protested, and I again protest against secret, irresponsible, overruling influence. The first question I asked when I saw the gentleman's resolution was, "Is this a measure of the cabinet?" Not of an open, declared cabinet, but of an invisible, inscrutable, unconstitutional cabinet, without responsibility, unknown to the constitution. I speak of back-stairs influence of men who bring messages to this house, which, although they do not appear on the journals, govern its decisions. Sir, the first question that I asked on the subject of British relations was, What is the opinion of the cabinet? What measures will they recommend to congress? (well knowing that whatever measures we might take, they must execute them, and therefore that we should have their opinion on the subject.) My answer was, (and from a cabinet minister too,)" There is no cabrSubsequent circumstances, sir, have given me a personal knowledge of the fact. It needs no commentary. But the gentleman has told you that we ought to go to war, if for nothing else, for the fur trade. Now, sir, the people on whose support he seems to calculate, follow (let me tell him) a better business, and let me add, that while men are happy at home reaping their own fields, the

net."

fruits of their labour and industry, there is little danger of their being induced to go sixteen or seventeen hundred miles in pursuit of beavers, raccoons, or opossums—much less of going to war for the privilege. They are better employed where they are. This trade, sir, may be important to Britains, to nations who have exhausted every resource of industry at home, bowed down by taxation and wretchedness. Let them, in God's name, if they please, follow the fur trade. They may, for me, catch every beaver in North America. Yes, sir, our people have a better occupation-a safe, profitable, honourable employment. While they should be engaged in distant regions in hunting the beaver, they dread but those, whose natural prey they are, should begin to hunt them, should pillage their property, and assassinate their constitution. Give up these wild schemes,-pay off your debt, and do not prate about its confiscation. Do not, I beseech you, expose at once your knavery and your folly. You have more lands than you know what do with; you have lately paid fifteen millions for yet more. Go and work them-and cease to alarm the people with the cry of wolf! until they become deaf to your voice, or at least laugh at you.

Mr. Chairman, if I felt less regard for what I deem the best interest of this nation, than for my own reputation, I should not on this day have offered to address you, but would have waited to come out bedecked with flowers and bouquets of rhetoric, in a set speech. But, sir, I dreaded lest a tone might be given to the mind of the committeethey will pardon me, but I did fear, from all that I could see, or hear, that they might be prejudiced by its advocates (under pretence of protecting our commerce) in favour of this ridiculous and preposterous project,-I rose, sir, for one, to plead guilty to declare in the face of day, that I will not go to war for this carrying trade. I will agree to pass for an idiot if this is not the public sentiment, and you will find it to your cost, begin the war when you will.

77.-SECOND EXTRACT FROM THE SAME.

AT the commencement of this session we received a printed message from the president of the United States, breathing a great deal of national honour and indignation at

the outrages we had endured, particularly from Spain. She was specially named and pointed at; she had pirated upon your commerce, imprisoned your citizens, violated your actual territory, invaded the very limits solemnly established between the two nations by the treaty of San Lorenzo. Some of the state legislatures (among others the very state on which the gentleman from Pennsylvania relies for support) sent forward resolutions pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honours, in support of any measures you might take in vindication of your injured rights. Well, sir, what have you done? You have resolutions laid upon your table-gone to some expense of printing and stationery-mere pen, ink and paper, and that's all. Like true political quacks, you deal only in handbills and nostrums. Sir, I blush to see the record of our proceedings; they resemble nothing but the advertisement of patent medicines. Here you have the "Wormdestroying Lozenges;" there," Church's Cough Drops," and, to crown the whole, "Sloan's Vegetable Specific," an infallible remedy for all nervous disorders and vertigoes of brain-sick politicians; each man earnestly adjuring you to give his medicine only a fair trial. If, indeed, these wonder-working nostrums could perform but one half of what they promise, there is little danger of our dying a political death at this time, at least. But, sir, in politics as in physic, the doctor is ofttimes the most dangerous disease and this I take to be our case at present.

But, sir, why do I talk of Spain? there are no longer Pyrenees. There exists no such nation, no such being as a Spanish king or minister. It is a mere juggle played off for the benefit of those who put the mechanism into motion. You know, sir, that you have no differences with Spain; that she is the passive tool of a superior power, to whom at this moment you are crouching. Are your differences indeed with Spain? And where are you going to send your political panacea, (resolutions and handbills excepted,) your sole arcanum of government, your king cure-all?To Madrid? No-you are not such quacks as not to know where the shoe pinches to Paris. You know at least where the disease lies, and there you apply your remedy. When the nation anxiously demands the result of your deliberation, you hang your head and blush to tell. You

are afraid to tell. Your mouth is hermetically sealed

Your honour has received a wound which must not take air. Gentlemen dare not come forward and avow their work, much less defend it in the presence of the nation. Give them all they ask, that Spain exacts, and what then? After shrinking from the Spanish jackall, do you presume to bully the British lion? But here the secret comes out. Britain is your rival in trade, and governed, as you are, by counting-house politicians, you would sacrifice the paramount interests of the country, to wound that rival. For Spain and France you are carriers-and from good customers every indignity is to be endured. And what is the nature of this trade? Is it that carrying trade which sends abroad the flour, tobacco, cotton, beef, pork, fish, and lumber of this country, and brings back in return foreign articles necessary for our existence or comfort? No, sir; 'tis a trade carried on, the Lord knows where, or by whom; now doubling Cape Horn, now the Cape of Good Hope. I do not say that there is no profit in it—for it would not then be pursued-but 'tis a trade that tends to assimilate our manners and government to those of the most corrupt countries of Europe-yes, sir, and when a question of great national magnitude presents itself to you, causes those who now prate about national honour and spirit, to pocket any insult, to consider it as a mere matter of debit and credit, a business of profit and loss, and nothing else.

The first thing that struck my mind when this resolution was laid on the table was, Unde derivatur? a question often put to us at school, Whence comes it? Is this only the putative father of the bantling he is taxed to maintain, or indeed the actual parent, the real progenitor of the child? or is it the production of the cabinet? But I knew you had no cabinet, no system. I had seen despatches relating to vital measures, laid before you the day after your final decision on those measures,-four weeks after they were received not only their contents, but their very existence, all that time unsuspected and unknown to men whom the people fondly believe assist with their wisdom and experience at every important deliberation of government. Do you believe that this system, or rather this no system, will do? I am free to answer it will not. It cannot last. I im not so afraid of the fair, open, constitutional, responsi

ble influence of government; but I shrink intuitively from this left-handed, invisible, irresponsible influence, which defies the touch, but pervades and decides every thing. Let the executive come forward to the legislature; let us see while we feel it. If we cannot rely on its wisdom, is it any disparagement to the gentleman from Pennsylvania to say that I cannot rely upon him? No, sir; he has mistaken his talent. He is not the Palinurus, on whose skill the nation, at this trying moment, can repose their confidence. I will have nothing to do with this paper-much less will I endorse it and make myself responsible for its goodness; I will not put my name to it. I assert that there is no cabinet nor system, no plan. That which I believe in one place, I shall never hesitate to say in another. This is no time, no place for mincing our words. The people have a right to know, they shall know the state of their affairs, at least as far as I am at liberty to communicate them. I speak from personal knowledge. Ten days ago there had been no consultation, there existed no opinion in your executive department, at least none that was avowed; on the contrary, there was an express disavowal of any opinion whatsoever on the great subject before you, and I have good reason for saying that none has been formed since. Some time ago a book was laid on our table, which, like some other bantlings, did not bear the name of its father. Here I was taught to expect a solution of all doubts, an end to all our difficulties. If, sir, I were the foe, as I trust I am the friend to this nation, I would exclaim, "O that mine enemy would write a book." the very outset, in the very first page, I believe, there is a complete abandonment of the principle in dispute. Has any gentleman got the work? [It was handed by one of the members.] The first position taken is the broad principle of the unlimited freedom of trade between nations at peace, which the writer endeavours to extend to the trade between a neutral and belligerant power, accompanied, however, by this acknowledgment-" But inasmuch as the trade of a neutral with a belligerant nation might, in certain special cases, affect the safety of its antagonist, usage, founded on the principle of NECESSITY, has admitted a few exceptions to the general rule." Whence comes the doctrine of contraband, blockade, and enemy's property?

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