at Britain, which was to insist that she
should, without compensation, surrender her claim. "If that ground be
taken," he wrote, "the war [on our part] will be confessedly, as it is
now impliedly, unjust."[3] Morris was a man honorably distinguished in
our troubled national history--a member of the Congress of the
Revolution and of the Constitutional Convention, a trained lawyer, a
practised financier, and an experienced diplomatist; one who
throughout his public life stood high in the estimation of Washington,
with whom he was in constant official and personal correspondence. It
is to be added that those to whom he wrote were evidently in sympathy
with his opinions.

[Illustration: GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
From the painting by Marchant, after Sully, in Independence
Hall, Philadelphia.]

So again Representative Gaston, of North Carolina, a member of the
same political party as Morris, speaking from his seat in the House in
February, 1814,[4] maintained the British doctrine of inalienable
allegiance. "Naturalization granted in another country has no effect
whatever to destroy the original primary allegiance." Even
Administration speakers did not deny this, but they maintained that
the native allegiance could be enforced only within its territorial
limits, not on the high seas. While perfectly firm and explicit as to
the defence of American seamen,--even to the point of war, if
needful,--Gaston spoke of the British practice as a right. "If you
cannot by substitute obtain an abandonment of the right, or practice,
to search our vessels, regulate it so as to prevent its abuse; waiving
for the present, not relinquishing, your objections to it." He
expressed sympathy, too, for the desperate straits in which Great
Britain found herself. "At a time when her floating bulwarks were her
whole safeguard against slavery, she could not view without alarm and
resentment the warriors who should have manned those bulwarks pursuing
a more gainful occupation in American vessels. Our merchant ships were
crowded with British seamen, most of them deserters from their ships
of war, and all furnished with fraudulent protections to prove them
Americans. To us they were not necessary." On the contrary, "they ate
the bread and bid down the wages of native seamen, whom it was our
first duty to foster and encourage." This competition with native
seamen was one of the pleas likewise of the New England opposition,
too much of which was obstina