Page:Debates in the Several State Conventions, v3.djvu/161

.] reasonable in the shape of amendments, they will receive us Union is as necessary for them as for us. Will they, then, ne so unreasonable as not to join us? If such be their dis position, I am happy to know it in time.

The honorable member then observed, that nations will expend millions for commercial advantages; that is, that they will deprive you of every advantage if they can. Apply this another way. Their cheaper way, instead of laying out millions in making war upon you, will be to corrupt your senators. I know that, if they be not above all price, they may make a sacrifice of our commercial interests. They may advise your President to make a treaty that will not only sacrifice all your commercial interests, but throw prostrate your bill of rights. Does he fear that their ships will outnumber ours on the ocean, or that nations whose interest comes in contact with ours, in the progress of their guilt, will perpetrate the vilest expedients to exclude us from a participation in commercial advantages? Does he advise us, in order to avoid this evil, to adopt a Constitution, which will enable such nations to obtain their ends by the more easy mode of contaminating the principles of our senators? Sir, if our senators will not be corrupted, it will be because they will be good men, and not because the Constitution provides against corruption; for there is no real check secured in it and the most abandoned and profligate acts may with impunity be committed by them.

With respect to Maryland, what danger from thence? I know none. I have not heard of any hostility premeditated or committed. Nine tenths of the people have not heard of it. Those who are so happy as to be illumined have not informed their fellow-citizens of it. I am so valiant as to say that no danger can come, from that source, sufficient to make me abandon my republican principles. The honorable gentleman ought to have recollected that there were no tyrants ill America, as there are in Europe. The citizens of republican borders are only terrible to tyrants. Instead of being dangerous to one another, they mutually support one another's liberties. We might be confederated with the adopting states without ratifying this system. No form of government renders a people more formidable. A confederacy of states joined together becomes strong as the United Netherlands. The government of Holland, execrated as it is, proves that 1913