by the
savages on one of our extensive frontiers--a warfare which is known to
spare neither age nor sex and to be distinguished by features peculiarly
shocking to humanity. It is difficult to account for the activity and
combinations which have for some time been developing themselves among
tribes in constant intercourse with British traders and garrisons
without connecting their hostility with that influence and without
recollecting the authenticated examples of such interpositions
heretofore furnished by the officers and agents of that Government.

Such is the spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped
on our country, and such the crisis which its unexampled forbearance and
conciliatory efforts have not been able to avert. It might at least
have been expected that an enlightened nation, if less urged by moral
obligations or invited by friendly dispositions on the part of the
United States, would have found in its true interest alone a sufficient
motive to respect their rights and their tranquillity on the high
seas; that an enlarged policy would have favored that free and general
circulation of commerce in which the British nation is at all times
interested, and which in times of war is the best alleviation of its
calamities to herself as well as to other belligerents; and more
especially that the British cabinet would not, for the sake of a
precarious and surreptitious intercourse with hostile markets, have
persevered in a course of measures which necessarily put at hazard the
invaluable market of a great and growing country, disposed to cultivate
the mutual advantages of an active commerce.

Other counsels have prevailed. Our moderation and conciliation have
had no other effect than to encourage perseverance and to enlarge
pretensions. We behold our seafaring citizens still the daily victims of
lawless violence, committed on the great common and highway of nations,
even within sight of the country which owes them protection. We behold
our vessels, freighted with the products of our soil and industry, or
returning with the honest proceeds of them, wrested from their lawful
destinations, confiscated by prize courts no longer the organs of public
law but the instruments of arbitrary edicts, and their unfortunate crews
dispersed and lost, or forced or inveigled in British ports into British
fleets, whilst arguments are employed in support of these aggressions
which have no foundation but in a princip