will be impotent and humble. National discord and abase ment.: 18. The disputes of the old treaty of 1783, being left to rankle, will reyive 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 often 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 had becu, 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. 19. 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 shew 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? 20. 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 this case contemplated by them, it should be peace, I do not hesitate to declare it ought not to be peace. 21. Is there any thing in the prospect of the interiør state of the country, to encourage us to aggravate the dangers of war? Would not the shock of that evil produce another, and shake down the feeble and then unbraced structure of our government? Is this the chimera? Is it going off the ground of matter of fact to say, the rejection of the appropriation proceeds upon the doctrin 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 dissension, 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 happy consequences of all this array of horrors. They can see the intestine discords, our government disorganized, our wrongs aggravated, multiplied and unredressed, peace with dishonor, or war without justice, union or resources in, the calm lights of mild philosophy." 22. Let me cheer the mind, weary no doubt, and ready to despond on this prospect, by presenting another which it is yet in our power to realize. Is it possible for a real American to look at the prosperity of this country without some desire for its continuance, without some respect for the measures which, many will say, produced, and all will confess have preserved it? Will he not feel some dread that a change of system will reverse the scene? The well grounded fears of our citizens in 1794 were removed by the treaty, but are not forgotten. Then they deemed war nearly inevitable, and would not this adjustment have been considered at that day as a happy escape from the 17 calamity? The great, interest and the general desire of our people was to enjoy the advantages of neutrality. This instrument, however misrepresented, affords America that inestimable security. The causes of our disputes are either cut up by the roots, or referred to a new negociation, after the end of the European war., This was gaining every thing, because it confirmed our neutrality by which our citizens are gaining every thing. This alone would justify the engagements of the government. For, when the fiery vapors of the war lowered in the skirts of our horizon, all our wishes, were concentered in this one, that we might escape the desolation of the storm. This treaty like a rainbow on the edge of the cloud, marked to our eyes the space where it was raging, and afforded at the same time the sure prognostic of fair weather. If we reject it, the vivid colors will grow pale, it will be a baleful meteor portending tempest and war. 7 23. Let us not hesitate then to agree to the appropriation to carry it into a faithful execution. Thus we shall save the faith of our nation, secure its peace and diffuse the spirit of confidence and enterp.ise that will augment its prosperity. The progress of wealth and improvement is wonderful, and some will think, too rapid. The field for exertion is faithful and vast, and if peace and good government should be preserved, the acquisition of our citizens are not so pleasing as the proof of their industry, as the instruments of their future success. The rewards of exertion go to augment its power. Profit is every hour becoming capital. The vast crop of our neutrality is all seed wheat, and is sown again to swell, almost beyond calculation, the future harvest of prosperity. And in this progress, what seems to be fiction, is found to fall short of experience. 24. I rose to speak under impressions that I would have resisted if I could. Those who see me will believe that the reduced state of my health has unfitted me, almost equally, for much exertion of body or mind. Unprepared for debate by careful reflection in my retirement, or by long attention here, I thought the resolution I had taken to sit silent was imposed by necessity, and would cost me no effort to maintain. With a mind thus vacant of ideas, and sinking as I really am, under a sense of weakness, I imagined the very desire of speaking was extinguished by the persuasion that I had nothing to say. Yet when I come to the moment of deciding the vote, I start back with dread from the edge of the pit into which we are plunging. Int my view, even the minutes I have spent in expostulation have their value, because they protract the crisis, and the short period in which alone we may resolve to escape it. 25. I have thus been led by my feelings to speak more at length than I had intended. Yet I have perhaps as little personal interest in the event as any one here. There is, I believe, no member who will not think his chance to be a witness of the consequence greater than mine. If howev er the vote should pass to reject, and a spirit should rise, as it will, with the public disorders to make confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as my hold upon life is, may outlive the government and constitution of my country. 1. From CICERO's Oration against VERRES. HE time has come, fathers, when that which has •The time has cond, for towards nilaying the envy your order has been subject to, and removing the imputations against trials, is (not by human contrivance but superior direction) effectualy put in our power. 2. An opinion has long prevailed, not only here at home, but likewise in foreign countries, both dangerous to you, and pernicious to the state, viz. that in prosecutions men of wealth are always safe, however clearly convicted! 3. There is now to be brought upon his trial before you, to the confusion I hope of the propagators of this slanderous imputation, one whose life and actions condemn him in the opinion of all impartial persons, but who according to his own reckoning and declared dependence upon his riches, is already acquitted: I mean Caius Verres. 4. If that sentence is past upon him which his crimes. deserve, your authority, fathers, will be venerable and sacred in the eyes of the public. But if his great riches should bias you in his favor, I shall still gain one point, viz. to make it apparent to all the world, that what was wanting in this case was not a criminal, nor prosecutor, but justice and adequate punishment. 5. To pass over the shameful irregularities of his youth, what does his questorship, the first public employment he held, what does it exhibit, but one continued scene of Villanies? Cneus Carbo plundered of the public money by his own treasurer, a consul stripped and betrayed, an army deserted and reduced to want, a province robbed, the civil and religious rights of a people violated. 6. The employment he held in Asia Minor and Pamphylia, what did it produce, but the ruin of those countries? in which houses, cities and temples, were robbed by him. What was his conduct in his pretorship here at home? Let' the plundered temples, and the public works, neglected, that he might embezzle the money intended for carrying them on, bear witness. But his pretorship in Sicily crowns all his works of wickedness, and furnishes a lasting monument to his infamy. 7. The mischiefs done by him in that country, during the three years of his iniquitous administration, are such, that many years, under the wisest and best of pretors, will not be sufficient to restore things to the condition in which he found them. 8 For it is notorious, that during the time of his tyranny, the Sicilians neither enjoyed the protection of their origin al laws, of the regulations made for their benefit by the Roman senate upon their coming under the protection of the commonwealth, nor of the natural and unalienable rights of men. 9. His nod has decided all causes in Sicily these three years; and his decisions have broken all law, all precedent, all right. The sums he has, by arbitrary taxes and unheard of impositions extorted from the industrious poor, are not to be computed. The most faithful allies of the commonwealth have been treated as enemies. 10. Roman citizens, have, like slaves, been put to death with tortures. The most atrocious criminals, for money have been exempted from deserved punishments: and men of the most unexceptionable characters condemned and banished unheard. 11. The harbors, though sufficently fortified, and the gates of strong towns, opened to pirates and ravagers; the soldiery and sailors belonging to a province under the protection of the commonwealth, starved to death; whole fleets, to the great detriment of the province, suffered to perish; the ancient monuments of either Sicilian or Roman greatness, the statues of heroes and princes, carried off, and the temples stripped of their images. |