owering over our constitution eternally, meeting together
in all parts of the Union, periodically, with closed doors, accumulating
a capital in their separate treasury, corresponding secretly and
regularly, and of which society the very persons denouncing the
democrats are themselves the fathers, founders, and high officers.
Their sight must be perfectly dazzled by the glittering of crowns and
coronets, not to see the extravagance of the proposition to suppress the
friends of general freedom, while those who wish to confine that freedom
to the few are permitted to go on in their principles and practices.
I here put out of sight the persons whose misbehavior has been taken
advantage of to slander the friends of popular rights; and I am happy
to observe, that as far as the circle of my observation and information
extends, every body has lost sight of them, and views the abstract
attempt on their natural and constitutional rights in all its nakedness.
I have never heard, or heard of, a single expression or opinion which
did not condemn it as an inexcusable aggression. And with respect to the
transactions against the excise law, it appears to me that you are all
swept away in the torrent of governmental opinions, or that we do not
know what these transactions have been. We know of none which, according
to the definitions of the law, have been any thing more than riotous.
There was indeed a meeting to consult about a separation. But to consult
on a question does not amount to a determination of that question in the
affirmative, still less to the acting on such a determination: but we
shall see, I suppose, what the court lawyers, and courtly judges, and
would-be ambassadors will make of it. The excise law is an infernal one.
The first error was to admit it by the constitution; the second, to act
on that admission; the third and last will be, to make it the instrument
of dismembering the Union, and setting us all afloat to choose what part
of it we will adhere to. The information of our militia, returned from
the westward, is uniform, that though the people there let them pass
quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that
one thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand
places of the Allegany; that their detestation of the excise law is
universal, and has now associated to it a detestation of the government;
and that separation which perhaps was a very distant and problematical
event, i