Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 3.djvu/169

1806. could not rest content with Gregg's Quaker ideas.


 * "After the course we are now taking," said Crowninshield, "should Britain persist in her captures and in her oppressive treatment of our seamen, and refuse to give them up, I would not hesitate to meet her in war. But, as I observed before, I do not believe Great Britain will go to war. Our trade is too valuable to her. She knows, too, that in such an event she will lose her eastern provinces; the States of Vermont and Massachusetts will ask no other assistance than their own militia to take Canada and Nova Scotia. Some of her West Indian islands will also fall. She knows also other things. Her subjects own sixteen millions of the old public debt of the United States, eight millions of the Louisiana stock, and three or four millions bank stock, and have private debts to the amount of ten or twelve millions,—amounting in the whole to nearly forty millions of dollars. Will Great Britain, by going to war, risk her provinces and this large amount of property?  I think she will not put so much to hazard."

When Crowninshield sat down, John Randolph took the floor. In Randolph's long career of oratorical triumphs, no such moment had offered itself before, or was to occur again. Still in Virginian eyes the truest and ablest Republican in Congress, the representative of power and principle, the man of the future, Randolph stood with the halo of youth, courage, and genius round his head,—a sort of Virginian Saint Michael, almost terrible in his contempt for whatever seemed to him base or untrue.