two
adjacent republics of North America.

Your mission was, to be a model for all other governments and for all
other less favored nations, to adhere to the most elevated principles of
political morality, to apply all your faculties to the gradual
improvement of your own institutions and social state, and, by your
example, to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large.
Instead of this, an appeal has been made to your worst passions; to
cupidity, to the thirst of unjust aggrandizement by brutal force; to the
love of military fame and of false glory; and it has even been tried to
pervert the noblest feelings of your nature. The attempt is made to make
you abandon the lofty position which your fathers occupied, to
substitute for it the political morality and heathen patriotism of the
heroes and statesmen of antiquity.

* * * * *

I have said, that it was attempted to pervert even your virtues.
Devotedness to country, or patriotism, is a most essential virtue, since
the national existence of any society depends upon it. Unfortunately,
our most virtuous dispositions are perverted, not only by our vices and
selfishness, but also by their own excess. Even the most holy of our
attributes, the religious feeling, may be perverted from that cause, as
was but too lamentably exhibited in the persecutions, even unto death,
of those who were deemed heretics. It is not, therefore, astonishing,
that patriotism, carried to excess, should also be perverted. In the
entire devotedness to their country, the people, everywhere and at all
times, have been too apt to forget the duties imposed upon them by
justice towards other nations. It is against this natural propensity
that you should be specially on your guard. The blame does not attach to
those who, led by their patriotic feelings, though erroneous, flock
around the national standard. On the contrary, no men are more worthy of
admiration, better entitled to the thanks of their country, than those
who, after war has once taken place, actuated only by the purest
motives, daily and with the utmost self-devotedness, brave death and
stake their own lives in the conflict against the actual enemy. I must
confess, that I do not extend the same charity to those civilians, who
coolly and deliberately plunge the country into any unjust or
unnecessary war.

We should have but one conscience; and most happy would it be for
mankind, were statesmen a