THE REPUBLICAN PARTY A NECESSITY.
————o————SPEECH
OF
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS,
OF MASSACHUSETTS.
————o————Delivered in the House of Representatives, May 31, 1860.
————o————The House having resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole,
Mr. ADAMS said:
Mr. chairman: On the third day of the present session, a gentleman from Mississippi, distinguished for his perspicuity of statement, but in a spirit more defiant than to my untutored sense seemed to be called for by the occasion, used the following language:
“One gentleman said we had brought the negro in here, and that he must be put out. Let us see you do it?
“Sir, there are twenty members from the South standing upon the floor by virtue of the negro, not as property, but as ‘persons not free.’ Put them out, will you? Sir, your fathers and my fathers did not put the negro out. They put him, as an institution of property, and of society, and of government, in the Constitution which you gentlemen swore to support.”
Of course, this putting in of the negro is a mere figure of speech. If he were veritably here in propria persona, I presume nobody would be more indignant than the gentleman himself. No. it is the master who stands here “by virtue of the negro.” And it is in this sense that the gentleman's remark is forcible; for in this sense it is true. We cannot put the negro out. This remark serves as a complete stopper to all the crimination and recrimination so freely indulged in between parties on the solemn point — which of the two first brought the negro in. Let them rest quiet hereafter on this topic. The negro was in before they began to talk about him at all. He will stay in, whether they choose to talk about him or not. He will grow in more and more, even while they are sleeping. To deprecate the misfortune is as idle as to complain of the force of the waters of Niagara. The subject is before us, and it is our duty to face the consideration of its proportions like statesmen, and not to imagine that, if we will only shut our eyes to it, it is not there; still less to suppose that either lamentation or anger, agitation or silence, will in any respect materially change the nature of the great problem which North America is inevitably doomed to solve. From the decree of Divine Providence there is no appeal.
In one important particular, however, the gentleman from Mississippi has fallen considerably below the fact. He says that twenty members stand upon this floor “by virtue of the negro.” If this wore so, I should be glad to see and to identify them — to set them apart, and to define the precise limit of the political power which the Constitution has thus created. Even twenty members would constitute no insignificant element in the struggles which will always be carried on for the attainment of power in every free Government. But the negro is dwarfed when he is measured only by the scale of twenty members. The real fact is, that “by virtue of the negro” ninety members stand upon this floor, each one of whom derives a sufficient proportion of his political vigor from that source to fasten him, firmly as the pole, to the maintenance of a policy which will keep that negro before our eyes, whether we determine to look upon him or not.
Neither does the proposition of the gentleman stop at this point. The negro does not remain stationary. He multiplies all day and every day. The sun never rises without finding him increased by hundreds. And the earth never completes its' annual circle without adding enough almost to place another member on this floor. Time does nothing to diminish the magnitude of this experiment. On the contrary, it makes it only more and more colossal. One gentleman, at this session, in venturing to stretch his range of vision only a quarter of a century, thought he saw eight millions; whilst another, in a bolder spirit, doubling the period, imagined the presence of sixteen millions. Yet what are fifty years in the record of the existence of great nations? I think I have seen, in the printed remarks of a distinguished member of the other House, a calm anticipation of the time when his section of country might contain a population of two hundred millions of negro slaves! How many members, I ask, will then stand upon this floor, “by virtue of the negro?” The imagination recoils from the idea of a Government, professing to be founded on human freedom, and yet containing within itself all the ramifications of a power capable of being as absolute as any oriental despotism. And yet it would be difficult to point out the error in this prognostication, always, supposing the current of human life to run in its ordinary and established channels. “Put the negro out, will you?” asks the gentleman from Mississippi. For my part, I know not what other answer to give than his own words, “Let us see you do it.”But the gentleman says that “his fathers and my fathers put him in the Constitution, which we are sworn to support.” So they did, in one sense, I am ready to admit. Let me consider for a moment the way they did it. Was it not by creating, through him, in the legislative department of the Government, a steady and permanent political power, exceeding at this moment one-third of the gross number of its lower branch? I say nothing here of the other features of the system. But I only ask, if it had so happened that any of the other well-known interests of property, such as the agricultural, or the manufacturing, or the commercial, or the banking interest, had secured anything bordering upon a similar influence in the public councils, would it not naturally have awakened some attention, and excited some uneasiness? How can we measure the power of three or four, of twenty, or of two hundred millions of human beings held in slavery, “by virtue of whom, not as property, but as persons not free,” to use the gentleman's phrase, one section already controls more than a third of the popular branch, nearly one-half of the aristocratic branch of the Legislature, more than half of the Cabinet officers in the Executive department, and five out of nine of the judges of the Supreme judicial tribunal? Apportion the increase of population, according to the Constitution, as you may, concede to the free regions all the advantage in relative growth that you can, the stern fact yet remains, of the constant presence of an influence, animated by one will, and looking to one purpose — that is, the preservation of its claims both to the pecuniary and the political advantages it holds “by virtue of the negro.” Even if it be considered in the secondary light of a commercial corporation, we have been told during this session, by a distinguished member from Alabama, that the joint stock of capital, even now, amounts to the enormous sum of $3,500,000,000; and, unlike most other corporations, this capital is not only susceptible of constant enlargement, but is constantly enlarged. In comparison with this, what was the Bank of the United States? What is the Bank of England? Nay, what has been the East India Company? The complaint was made of the latter, that its members controlled a few venal boroughs in Parliament. But here the shareholders sit constantly “by virtue” of their stock, in both Houses of Congress, in the Cabinet of the Executive, and on the bench of the highest judicial court. They help make, they execute, and they expound the laws of the land. For my part, I must say that I have observed nothing in the pages of history so skillfully adapted to the establishment of a stupendous oligarchy, as this interlacing of the interests of a single species of what is denominated property, with all the ramifications of the political agencies in a State.
Truly, then, has the gentleman said, we cannot put the negro out, whom his fathers and our fathers consented to put into the Constitution. I, for one, add, very frankly, 1 do not seek to put him out. Whatever benefit may have been obtained by him and his friends, from a fair construction of the instrument, I have no intention to cut off. But, on the other hand, it should be observed, that no advantage such as they enjoy can ever be long used without the experience of a corresponding drawback. It is of the nature of power, when concentrated over much, to produce the necessity of an equally great force to balance it. In a free Government this is particularly true. No man or set of men can hope to direct and control it a great while, without stirring up fears that they may abuse their privileges, to the injury of their fellows. Now, if it be once conceded that such a power has been erected under the present Constitution, “by virtue of the negro,” it is not necessary to show proof of any past abuse of it, to justify measures of precaution against abuse in the future. We recognise the truth of the old maxim, that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as well as of that other one, which in my youth I remember to have been familiarly used in quarters in which it seems to me that I seldom hear it now a days, “Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.” I say, then, that even if the control which has been gained “by virtue of the negro” could be shown to have been exercised for the benefit of all classes of people in the United States alike; if it could be proved to have done nothing to undermine the pillars of our Temple of Liberty, still, the very fact that it might do the utmost possible injury at some unguarded moment, and that nothing but its own will stands in the way to prevent it, would be ample justification for an immediate resort to the most energetic measures of association to ward off the peril. There is no need, then, of further explaining the reasons for the rise of the Republican party. We have indeed been told that it is a standing menace to our brethren of the slaveholding States, and that nothing will quiet them but its immediate dissolution. But, apart from the singular absence of acquaintance with the philosophy of party politics in a free country which such a demand betrays, I would respectfully ask on what grounds it can be proposed, so long as the policy which it denounces remains purely defensive? No sane man will deny that the negro is multiplying with rapidity; that by virtue of this increase the pecuniary interests involved in the continuance of his present condition are steadily accumulating; that a coextensive increase of political power is going on in this Hall, as in the other branches of the Government, and that the whole character and tendency of the influence thus generated is unpropitious to the maintenance of our notions of freedom. Is it to be pretended, then, that we, whose rights are liable to be deeply affected by the preponderance in the public councils of such a power, have no right to associate and organize with the intent to guard against its bad effects? Such a notion was not entertained when the case of a comparatively trifling moneyed corporation was in question, nor when the supposed ascendency of insignificant manufacturing interests was thought to be alarming. How, then, can it be advanced in the face of a combination of wealth and political power in comparison with which the bank and the tariff were but as atoms in the creation? But I now go one step further, and declare that this proceeding is not only justifiable as a precaution against the possibility of an abuse of power, but that it is indispensably necessary to the actual salvation of our free institutions. Nobody is yet hardy enough to deny that the idea of liberty, as the guardian and protectress of the individual citizen against all assaults of mere arbitrary power, has been, since the days of the Revolution, the darling idol in the American mind. “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God,” was a maxim which, nowhere more than in the Ancient Dominion, nerved the arms of the fathers to the struggle that placed us here in this Hall, the Representatives of a free people. It found its expression in the celebrated Act of Union tor the common defence, proclaimed to the world in language too familiar to need quotation. Nobody at the time misunderstood its meaning. Nobody undervalued the heroism which made the cause of the oppressed colonist the cause of all mankind. Half a century passed away, and not one of the countless number of statesmen and orators who, each in his turn, joined to swell the note of exultation in the proud position attained by his country as the champion of that cause, ever thought to cast a doubt upon the universality of the grand doctrine which the Declaration of Independence had enunciated. It was reserved to the men of the present day to discover a new version which, in limiting its application to a special and favored class, at one stroke dwarfs the stature of the revolutionary patriots, and sinks the noblest contest in history down to the level of the late encounter of pugilism, for the possession of a belt, on the other side of the water. If their view of it be the right one, then was the whole of the great controversy a deliberate fraud; then has the world been cheated by false pretences; then were our fathers rogues who deserved to suffer the penalties of the law for rebellion against the constituted authorities of the mother country, instead of earning the glorious meed of the patriot's crown. The cardinal principle of the Revolution, that which marks a real advance in the progress of political institutions, is that the individual man, whether in or out of the social organization, whilst doing no wrong, has certain rights which his fellow-man all over the globe is bound to respect. The general establishment of this maxim in the practice of the nations of the world is, or ought to be, the mission of America during the present century of her growth. In 1776 there was a bright prospect of its speedy accomplishment. For some years it spread both at home and abroad; for it is not to be denied that the effect of her instruction has been and is still felt, not here alone, but in every quarter of the world. Nobody can have failed to observe the progress that has been made in the recognition of popular rights in every civilized country down to the present time. It would doubtless have been still more rapid but for the astonishing fact that the very people which was the first to enunciate the great truth has been slowly but steadily withdrawing itself from all sympathy with the prosecution of it. Imperceptibly at first, but very distinctly within a short time, this reaction has gone on, until in the term of this Administration the respective representatives before the world of this great nation have united in one grand counter-declaration, and that is, that there are men all over the world whose rights no white man is bound to respect. It does indeed appear as if this grave and solemn decree of Judges, of Presidents, of Senators, and Representatives, in a free country, did fly in the face of the Declaration of Independence, long acknowledged among us as undoubted authority for political doctrine. But we are now given to understand, in the same high quarters, that there is no difficulty in reconciling this apparent contradiction. The way is this. The language of the Declaration is well known; “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The new version is, that Mr. Jefferson, when he wrote the words, “all men,” clearly intended only all white men! But here is an obstacle at the threshold. Of course, if this be the construction, the necessary implication is, that the rest of mankind are not endowed with the same inalienable rights which the Creator bestowed on the whites. Hence the latter are justified in regarding the former as inferior creatures, whom they may subject to their will if they can. I understand this consequence to be distinctly admitted by the friends of the new view. Now, the fact is well known that Mr. Jefferson owed his position as the draughtsman of that celebrated paper mainly to his reputation as a writer capable of expressing his meaning with distinctness and force. But if this construction of the passage be true, what are I we to think of his skill, when he said that “all men are created equal,” instead of declaring what the new version means, and that is, that “all men are not created equal;" and hence that the rights which he pronounces inalienable in all, are in fact alienable in a great majority of the human race, at the will and pleasure of a minority who happen to be created with pale faces? Surely it is pretty hard to believe that so lucid a writer could, with his eyes open, have fallen into such a delusion as to mean, in a public paper which he regarded as the crowning merit of his life, the precise reverse of what he actually said. Still more difficult is it to imagine that, though he lived for half a century afterwards in the midst of discussions and disputes particularly calculated to keep alive his recollection of what he did mean, he should never have whispered to any living soul, either privately or publicly, a single doubt of his having been correctly understood. He well knew the sense which his cotemporaries universally attached to his words. If he had any other in his mind, why did he not disclose it? Fortunately for the reputation of the distinguished son of Virginia, whose noblest work I, a son of Massachusetts, am proud to defend against the cruel assaults of citizens of his own State, there is other evidence in the context of this immortal paper conclusively to prove that he meant exactly what he said, and that the new version is an after-thought of a later age. So far from narrowing his application of the words “all men” to white men only, as having inalienable rights to life and liberty, he goes on, in the original draught, to make a solemn charge against the King of Great Britain; for what, pray? Why, to use his own language, “because he has waged cruel war against HUMAN NATURE ITSELF, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people.” It appears, then, by this, that Mr. Jefferson thought it was human nature itself that possessed these most sacred rights which he denominates inalienable, and not the small portion of it included in the white population. Ay, and that is not all. Who, I ask, are the “persons of a distant people” to whom he refers as deprived of those most sacred rights under this cruel tyranny? They are the very blacks of the African race whom the King had torn from their homes and made slaves to the colonists of America. They are the very people of whom we are now told by the judges of our highest court, who would seem by their argument completely to justify that monarch, that they “have no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” And, singularly enough, as if to mark, beyond the possibility of the most arrant fatuity to misconceive it, Mr. Jefferson's intent, in charging the sovereign with the crime of his determination to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he takes pains, in the original manuscript, with his own hand, to write that word “MEN” in capital letters; the only word so written, it should be observed, in the whole body of the document. I would humbly submit, then, upon this evidence, that if any narrower application is to be made of the words “all men” than that which they naturally bear, a much stronger argument could be made from the context in favor of limiting it to all black men of the African race, than in defence of the attempt to twist it exclusively for the benefit of the whites. But when Mr. Jefferson appeals to the comprehensive term of “human nature,” as possessing these rights, it is plain enough that he, at least, was for covering all of every race equally under the shelter of this beneficent national proclamation. But the question now is not what Mr. Jefferson or his compeers intended. The fact is beyond contradiction, that the Judiciary and the Executive head of the Federal Government have practically adopted the opposite construction, and a very large number of people are prepared to confirm it. The reason for this remarkable revolution of opinion leads us at once to the source of our present divisions. Passing over all secondary disputes about Wilmot provisoes or squatter sovereignty, about fugitive slave laws or protection of the rights of so-called property, as the mere incidents, let us look the real issue calmly in the face. The construction put upon the Declaration of Independence for the first half century of our career is favorable to the liberty of human nature throughout the world. The construction now put upon the same language is designed to destroy it, by setting up one portion of mankind so far above another as to justify the former in compelling the latter to perpetual subjection to its will. Hence, though it may be affirmed that the white race are created equal, and possessed of certain inalienable right, this affirmation must be understood as made by themselves, exclusively for their own benefit, and with the deliberate intent to deny to every other class on earth any privilege which shall avail them against a successful attempt to enslave them, whether by force or fraud. If it be once assumed by the white that the black man of Africa has no rights which he is bound to respect, by parity of reasoning it inevitably follows that a resort to the same processes of violence and crime which brought him to his mournful condition may be had by him in his turn, wherever he can get the power, towards the white. And the same remark will apply to any and every other race of mankind which chooses to set itself up as the arbiter of the rights of the creation. There is, then, by this theory, no such thing on earth as liberty guarantied to any one. This decision strips us all alike of any rights but such as we may maintain by our own right arms. It is the American sanctification of the sovereignty of force, through the old argument of prescription. It is the tyrant's plea of necessity, varnished over with the thin gilding of modern politico-judicial Democracy. If I am right in my deductions, then the case stands thus at this moment: a great and powerful combination in the United States has been able so far to control political opinion as to carry the Government clean away from the acknowledgment of the soundness of doctrines of liberty universally recognised in the first half century of our career; and, furthermore, to make that Government justify and defend, for certain purposes, a law founded originally on nothing but fraud and force. Surely, if this be admitted, it can be no further cause of surprise that those among the people who still remain attached to the old and cherished principles of the better days of the Republic, who yet believe that the mission of the Government is to promote the law of liberty, and to resist oppression, and who mean to make it such, if honest efforts will effect it, should associate in an organization having for its object the restoration of the ancient and true idea, and the overthrow of the false one. If anything is to be done with effect, it is high time to set about it. Nearly all the avenues to power are guarded by opponents. The strongest political organization known in our history has been made subservient to their will. Nothing will avail against the omnipotence of the power acquired “by virtue of the negro,” as 1 have already described it, but union, energy, and ceaseless vigilance in resisting its further progress. Here stand in antagonism once more the old enemies — liberty and authority. Here is renewed in a modified shape the “irrepressible conflict,” that is as ancient, at least, as the days when Moses struck the Egyptian. Are we, then, to be told that the organization must be dissolved, because it is a standing menace to the slaveholding States? What! the doctrines of liberty a menace to the slave States! Your fathers did not think so, when they proclaimed them years ago; and we are doing no more now, than your fathers did then! It must be admitted that in this, as in all sharp contests for the right, the respective antagonists often rush into extremes of opinion, mix up their feelings with their reasoning, and perpetually criminate each other as guilty of aggressions, just as if either side could resist the force of the circumstances that surround them. No doubt many errors have been, are, and will be, committed on both sides, which calm and judicious patriots are ready to deplore. They, in the main, spring from the nature of a popular Government, which breeds classes of men whose disposition it is to distinguish themselves by stimulating the prevailing passion of the moment. Nowhere is this more likely to be the case than in the treatment of the slave question, in which the fears for the safety of a pecuniary interest greatly aggravate the customary irritation attending purely political conflicts. This is one reason why changes in the doctrines of the slaveholding party from time to time have so rapidly taken place. The most material of these, and that which made the present position of parties inevitable, happened about thirty years ago, when the old revolutionary dogma that slavery was an evil imposed upon one portion of the country, against its will, which it tolerated only from the necessity of the case, gave place to the modern dictum that slavery was a benefit to the African, and a positive blessing to the master, and that the social system evolved from this relation could justly boast of being the highest type of civilization. I have no manner of doubt that this novel, and, to me, shocking doctrine, always has been and is yet repudiated by numbers of the wisest and the best of the citizens of the slaveholding States, just as it was rejected by Washington and Jefferson, by Madison and Mason, (Virginia can boast of no greater names.) in the early, and by Henry Clay in the later days of the Republic. But they find themselves powerless against the progress of an idea that seems to relieve people from the necessity of excusing a wrong which they are at all events determined to commit. It is much easier to turn the doubtful act into a positive merit, and claim credit as a virtue for steady perseverance in what they desire to do. Be this as it may, it is this change which has brought the country into its present difficult situation. For just so long as slavery was understood to be an evil in the social system, just so long was it unreasonable to demand its establishment in regions where it had never existed. The law of liberty as an acknowledged blessing was then the rule, and slavery was only tolerated as an exception, from the necessity of the case, in countries from which it could not be safely eradicated. But so soon as this theory was exploded, and the notion that slavery was a positive advantage, not only to both master and slave, but to all the members of a civilized community, became prevalent in its place, another set of duties immediately devolved upon the conscientious believers of the new faith. The right to expand became no less clear than the obligation grew imperative. The question no longer remains confined within the borders of actual slaveholding States. It spreads itself abroad, not merely over the plains yet untrodden by the foot of the settler, but into long-established and populous communities which do not yet see the light of conviction on this point. It becomes the great discovery of the age. If, indeed, the proposition be once admitted as sound, I cannot, for my part, understand why it does not legitimately follow that every free State in the Union — nay, every free State in the world — is not doing itself a positive injury by refusing to harbor the blessed institution in its bosom. If slavery be a good in itself, why not diffuse it as universally as possible? Here, then, we see the practical consequence of the abandonment of the fundamental principle of the Declaration of Independence; and here we see the absolute necessity for the establishment of an associated organization which shall be potent enough to overthrow this false doctrine, and to resist every practical form of its development. I say it not in any spirit of menace or of unkindness to those who disagree with me on this matter, but because I feel it to be a solemn duty incumbent upon me as a Representative of a State pledged by all its past history to maintain the cause of freedom and free institutions. There can be no compromise whatever on this issue. So long as it remains undetermined — and that is equivalent to saying, so long as the people of these States remain themselves free — so long an organized party will continue in the field, having for its main object the restoration, as a cardinal principle of the Federal Government, of the ancient doctrine of the inalienable rights of man. If this be a standing menace to the people of the slaveholding States, so be it. We may regret that they so regard it, and love them too, but we must love liberty more. So said Brutus and Cassius in their hour of peril, to Mark Antony, when he was deserting the sacred cause they had sworn to support: “Vocemus te ad nullas inimicitias; sed tamen pluris nostram libertatem quam tuam amicitiam œstimemus.”[1] The party thus associated has no purposes which it seeks to conceal. It harbors no hostile designs against the rights of any of the States. Its leading idea is reform, total and fundamental, in the spirit in which the Government has of late years been administered — reform, also, in the details, which appear of late to have been suffered to run into many grave abuses. It is not to be concealed, that all over the country there is a well-defined impression that, for the sake of retaining power, corruption has been tolerated, if not actively encouraged, in high places; and the various efforts at investigation made within a few years, so far from removing that uneasiness, have gone far to increase it. Without undertaking to judge of the truth or the error at the bottom of the feeling, I do yet maintain that, for the honor of the country and of all who may be concerned in the administration of the Government, there is an overruling necessity for a complete change of the persons now responsible for its direction. The reform must be wide enough to restore freedom as the guide of the Federal policy, and to pull down the idol which has usurped her throne. It must be deep enough to reinstate honesty above suspicion in the dispensation of the pecuniary contracts incident to the possession of great place. If the execution of such a policy as this constitutes good ground for a resort to extreme measures of resistance by any portion of the people of these States, then is there no hope of further harmony in America; for the evils which would ensue to us, if we were deterred from action by such considerations, would be far more fatal to the public peace and prosperity, in the ultimate result, than any which could grow out of perseverance against unreasonable demands. Once more may the words of the great Roman patriots be appealed to: “Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.”[2] And the remedy is secession, or, in plainer words, a dissolution of the Union and a disruption of the Constitution! So we are told. In a word, the people who defy us to put the negro out of this Hall; who claim that, by virtue of that negro, twenty of their number stand upon this floor; who hold a majority of the seats on the bench of the Supreme Court; who have time out of mind wielded in their own favor the executive influence of the Federal Government, imagine that they are about to better their condition by abandoning all these enormous privileges, and by setting up another Government, without any similar advantages, among themselves. Perhaps there might be some plausibility in this idea, if you could fence yourselves all round with a high wall, and proclaim a complete non-intercourse with the world outside. But the day for these fancies is passing off, even with the Chinese and the Japanese, who have held to them the longest. Your slaves will not be made safer at home, or less aggressive when abroad, by the withdrawal of the power of reclamation; neither will your internal condition be less an object of anxiety to your neighbors than it is now. The mere fact of the existence or the non-existence of a common bond of government may modify, but it cannot materially change, the conditions of your great social problem. If the Constitution were expunged by agreement to-morrow, its difficulties might, indeed, be aggravated, but, trust me, not one of them would be removed. Whatever we may choose to think or say of one another, either for good or evil, a higher Power above us has raised up on this continent a people, who, whether united or divided, whether praying or cursing, whether loving or fighting, are destined to remain, in all the essential features of religion, language, thought, feeling, habits, customs, and manners, one and the same. Whatever seriously touches the condition of one portion of us, does and will have its effect upon the rest. In spite of all efforts to the contrary, there is and will be a common sympathy, having its root in that universal principle, a simple allusion to which, by a great dramatist of antiquity, is said to have instantaneously elicited a burst of enthusiasm from the thousands who crowded the Roman theatre — “I am a man; nothing that touches men can fail to move me.” Do you say that you can and will resist all this; that you will shut yourselves up at home, and see no more of the light of reason than is consistent with the preservation of what you are pleased to denominate your property? Then try it a while, if you are mad enough to be bent on the experiment. But permit me to predict, at this time, THAT IT WILL INNOMINIOUSLY FAIL. You cannot separate from us, unless you can blot from your memory all the traces of a common descent, a common literature, social affinities cemented by the dearest ties, and of a common faith. The violent men who are counselling this extreme policy, and in whom you now put your trust, will not retain their hold upon your confidence, when you open your eyes to the consequences of their work, and to the causes which they assign in their justification. It may then be too late entirely to repair the damage; but, whether late or early, you shall not have it to say, that there was not at least one voice, however humble, among those of your fancied opponents, which did not warn you of the folly of throwing off friends and fellow-citizens, only because they preferred to follow the doctrines taught by your and their fathers, rather than to desert them in your company. CHOOSE YE, WHERE YOU WILL GO. AS FOR US, WE WILL ADHERE TO THE ANCIENT FAITH. [1] We invite you to no quarrel; but we set a higher value on our own liberty than on your friendship. [2] The voice of menace has no power with freemen.