vail
in this Assembly. Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them
on every occasion; and though in the heat of debate men are generally
disposed to contradict every authority urged by their opponents, ours
has been treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to
question. I am sorry that in the moment of such a disposition, any thing
should come from us to check it. The placing them on a mere footing with
the English, will have this effect. When of two nations, the one has
engaged herself in a ruinous war for us, has spent her blood and money
to save us, has opened her bosom to us in peace, and received us almost
on the footing of her own citizens, while the other has moved heaven,
earth, and hell to exterminate us in war, has insulted us in all
her councils in peace, shut her doors to us in every part where her
interests would admit it, libelled us in foreign nations, endeavored to
poison them against the reception of our most precious commodities; to
place these two nations on a footing, is to give a great deal more
to one than to the other, if the maxim be true, that to make unequal
quantities equal, you must add more to one than the other. To say, in
excuse, that gratitude is never to enter into the motives of national
conduct, is to revive a principle which has been buried for centuries
with its kindred principles of the lawfulness of assassination, poison,
perjury, &c. All of these were legitimate principles in the dark ages
which intervened between ancient and modern civilization, but exploded
and held in just horror in the eighteenth century. I know but one code
of morality for men, whether acting singly or collectively. He who says
I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an
honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion,
but not in the latter. I would say with the poet, '_Hie niger est; hunc
tu, Romane, caveto_.' If the morality of one man produces a just line of
conduct in him, acting individually, why should not the morality of one
hundred men produce a just line of conduct in them, acting together?
But I indulge myself in these reflections because my own feelings run me
into them; with you they were always acknowledged. Let us hope that our
new government will take some other occasion to show, that they mean to
proscribe no virtue from the canons of their conduct with other nations.
In every other instance, the new government has usher