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also the lash on the slightest lapses from a rigorous discipline, and is moreover exposed to the bitter fate of fighting against those towards whom he has no hostility, perhaps his own countrymen, it may be, his own immediate kindred. This is not exaggeration, fellowcitizens, it is reality and fact.

But, say the British, we want not your men; we want only our own. Prove that they are yours and we will surrender them up. Baser outrage! insolent indignity! that a free born American must be made to prove his nativity to those who have previously violated his liberty, else he is to be held forever as a slave! That before a British tribunal, a British boarding officer, a free born American must be made to seal up the vouchers of his lineage, to exhibit the records of his baptism and his birth, to establish the identity that binds him to his parents, to his blood, to his native land, by setting forth in odious detail his size, his age, the shape of his frame, whether his hair is long or cropt, his marks, like an ox or a horse of the manger; that all this must be done as the condition of his escape from the galling thraldom of a British ship! Can we hear it, can we think of it, with any other than indignant feelings at our tarnished name and nation? And suppose through this degrading process his deliverance to be effected, where is he to seek redress for the intermediate wrong? The unauthorized seizure and detention of any piece of property, a mere trespass upon goods, will always lay the foundation for some, often the heaviest retribution, in every well regulated society. But to whom, or where, shall our imprisoned citizen, when the privilege of shaking off his fetters has at last been accorded to him, turn for his redress? where look to reimburse the stripes, perhaps the wounds he has received; his worn spirit, his long inward agonies? No, the public code of nations recognizes not the penalty, for to the modern rapaciousness of Britain it was reserved to add to the dark catalogue of human sufferings this flagitious crime.

But why be told that, even on such proofs, our citizens will be released from their captivity? We have long and sorely experienced the impracticable nature of this boon which, in the imagined relaxation of her deep injustice, she would affect to hold out. Go to the office of the department of state, within sight of where we are assembled, and there see the piles of certificates and documents, of affidavits, records and seals, anxiously drawn out and folded up, to show why Americans should not be held as slaves, and see how they rest, and will forever rest, in hopeless neglect upon the shelves! Some defect in form, some impossibility of filling up all the crevices which British exaction insists upon being closed; the uncertainty, if, after all, they will ever reach their point of destination, the climate or the sea where the hopes of gain or the lust of conquest are impelling, through constant changes, their ships; the probability that the miserable individual, to whom they are intended as the harbinger of liberation from his shackles, may have been translated from the first scene of his incarceration to another, from a seventyfour to a sixtyfour, from a sixtyfour to a frigate, and thus through rapid, if not designed mutations, a practice which is known to exist; these are obvious causes of discouragement, by making the issue at all times doubtful, most frequently hopeless. And this Great Britain cannot but know. She does know it, and, with deliberate mockery, in the composure with which bloated power can scoff at submissive and humble suffering, has she continued to increase and protract our humiliation as well as our suffering, by renewals of the visionary offer.

Again it is said, that our citizens resemble their men, look like them in their persons, speak the same language, that discriminations are difficult or impracticable, and therefore it is they are unavoidably seized. Most insulting excuse! And will they impeach that God who equally made us both, who forms our features, moulds our statures and stamps us with a

countenance that turns up to his goodness in adoration and love? Impious as well as insulting! The leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin, but we, we, are to put off our bodies and become unlike ourselves as the price of our safety! Why should similarity of face yoke us exclusively with an ignominious burden? Why, because we were once descended from them, should we be made at this day, and forever, to clank chains? Suppose one of their subjects landed upon our shores-let us suppose him a prince of their blood-shall we seize upon him to mend our highways, shall we draft him for our ranks? Shall we subject him in an instant to all the civil burdens of duty, of taxation, of every species of aid and service that grow out of the allegiance of the citizen, until he can send across the ocean for the registers of his fa mily and birth? What has her foul spirit of impressment to answer to this? Why not equally demand on our part, that every one of her factors, who lands upon our soil, should bring a protection in his pocket, or hang one round his neck, as the price of his safety? If this plea of monstrous outrage be, only for one instant, admitted, remember, fellow-citizens, that it becomes as lasting as monstrous. If our children, and

our children's children, and their children, continue to speak the same tongue, to hold the same port with their fathers, they also will be liable to this enslavement, and the groaning evil be co-existent with British poweritish rapacity, and the maxim, that the British navy must have men! If our men are like theirs, it should form, to any other than a nation callous to justice, dead to the moral sense, and deliberately bent upon plunder, the very reason why they should give up the practice, seeing that it is intrinsically liable to these mistakes, and that the exercise of what they call a right on their part necessarily brings with it the most high-handed wrongs to us.

I am a Roman citizen, I am a Roman citizen! was an exclamation that insured safety, commanded re

of duty; to ask, if need be, the largest sacrifices of advantage and of ease. The tranquillity, the enjoyments, the hopes of peace, are, for a while, at an end. These, with their endearing concomitants, are to give place to the stronger and more agitating passions, to the busy engagements, to the solemn and anxious thoughts, to the trials, to the sufferings, that follow in the train of war.

Man, in his individual nature, becomes virtuous by constant struggles against his own imperfections. His intellectual eminence, which puts him at the head of created beings, is attained also by long toil, and painful self-denials, bringing with them, but too often, despondence to his mind, and hazards to his frame. It would seem to be a law of his existence, that great enjoyment is only to be obtained as the reward of great exertion. "She shall go to a wealthy place," but her way shall be "through fire and through water." It seems the irreversible lot of nations, that their permanent well-being is to be achieved also through severe probations. Their origin is often in agony and blood, and their safety to be maintained only by constant vigilance, by arduous efforts, by a willingness to encounter danger and by actually and frequently braving it. Their prosperity, their rights, their liberties, 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 portrays, that humanity deplores the misery which they inflict. If the wishes of the philanthropist could be realized, then, indeed, happily for us, happily for the whole human race, they would be banished forever from the world. But while selfishnes, 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 fierce, 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.

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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. 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 outraged? 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 conciliation, again and again, across seas, and to distant countries; to ask, earnestly 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 subjects of rude seizure and rapacious spoliation. These have been the ends they were sent to obtain; ends too fair for protracted

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