in of the British navy! You talk of peace, friendship
and cordiality with the nation from whom most of us sprang! It is
well, perhaps, that the two nations should be at peace politically;
but can you ever expect cordiality to subsist between our impressed
and cruelly treated sailor, and a British navy officer. It is next to
impossible. Our ill treated sailor, lacerated in his flesh, wounded in
his honor, and debased by the slavish hand of a boatswain's mate,
never can forget the barbarians; nor ever can, nor ever ought to
forgive them. The God of nature has ordained that nations should be
separated by a difference of language, religion, customs, and manners,
for wise purposes; but where two great nations, like the English and
American, have the same language, institutions and manners, he may
possibly have allowed the devil to inspire one with a portion of his
own infernal spirit of cruelty, in order to effect a separation, and
keep apart two people, superficially resembling each other.

It may be for good and wise purposes, in the order of Providence, that
there should be a partition wall between us and Britain. We have had
to deplore that three thousand miles of ocean is not half enough; for
avarice, fashion and folly, are continually drawing us together; and
these often drown the still small voice of patriotism, whose language
is, "_Come out of her, O my people!_" There is nothing that tends so
strongly to keep us asunder, as the different _dispositions_ of the
two people. The Americans are a kind, humane, tender-hearted people,
as free from cruelty as any nation upon earth; and possessing as much
generosity towards an enemy they have vanquished, and who is at their
mercy, as any people to be found on the records of the human kind.
Their laws express it; the records of their courts prove it; the
history of the war illustrates it; and I hope that all our actions
declare it. We may change, and become as hard hearted and cruel as the
English. It may be that we are now in the _chivalrous_ age, or that
period of our political existence, which is the generous, youthful
stage of a nation's life; this may pass away, and we may sink into the
cold, phlegmatic, calculating cruelty of the present Britons; and
become, like them, objects of hatred to our own descendants. Whatever
we may, in the course of degeneration, become, we assert it, as an
incontrovertible fact, that the Britons are now, and have been for
many generations pas