uld become a curse upon the world
and upon herself.

The conduct of the Barbary powers, though unjust in principle, is suited
to their prejudices, situation, and circumstances. The crusades of the
church to exterminate them fixed in their minds the unobliterated belief
that every Christian power was their mortal enemy. Their religious
prejudices, therefore, suggest the policy, which their situation and
circumstances protect them in. As a people, they are neither commercial
nor agricultural, they neither import nor export, have no property
floating on the seas, nor ships and cargoes in the ports of foreign
nations. No retaliation, therefore, can be acted upon them, and they sin
secure from punishment.

But this is not the case with the United States. If she sins as a
Barbary power, she must answer for it as a Civilized one. Her commerce
is continually passing on the seas exposed to capture, and her ships
and cargoes in foreign ports to detention and reprisal. An act of War
committed by her in the Mississippi would produce a War against the
commerce of the Atlantic States, and the latter would have to curse the
policy that provoked the former. In every point, therefore, in which the
character and interest of the United States be considered, it would
ill become her to set an example contrary to the policy and custom of
Civilized powers, and practised only by the Barbary powers, that of
striking before she expostulates.

But can any man, calling himself a Legislator, and supposed by his
constituents to know something of his duty, be so ignorant as to imagine
that seizing on New Orleans would finish the affair or even contribute
towards it? On the contrary it would have made it worse. The treaty
right of deposite at New Orleans, and the right of the navigation of the
Mississippi into the Gulph of Mexico, are distant things. New Orleans is
more than an hundred miles in the country from the mouth of the river,
and, as a place of deposite, is of no value if the mouth of the river be
shut, which either France or Spain could do, and which our possession
of New Orleans could neither prevent or remove. New Orleans in our
possession, by an act of hostility, would have become a blockaded
port, and consequently of no value to the western people as a place of
deposite. Since, therefore, an interruption had arisen to the commerce
of the western states, and until the matter could be brought to a fair
explanation, it was of less injury