Page:Review of the Proclamation of President Jackson.djvu/52

 "my own, my native land," and that it was created by the only human authors who I acknowledge as having legitimate authority to create a Nation, its own People, quorum pars fui, I cannot but feel intense interest as to its fate. Did its authors become convinced, like some Philosophers of the olden time, that a People occupying a territory of vast extent, could not long exist in freedom, and in peace, as one Nation; because, unfeeling and interested majorities, would more probably oppress minorities, than any single despot; and therefore, sacrificing their ideas of splendid grandeur, to their love of liberty, destroy the work of their own hands, leaving no memorial to tell even that "Lyons was"; or did this new monster nation, raise its parricidal hand against the prior work of the authors of its own being, and bring to it an untimely end, to gratify its own lusts? If "History is Philosophy teaching by example," the narrative of the downfall of this first nation would doubtless furnish some useful lessons to statesmen of other times.

But it is lost, "and like the baseless fabric of a vision, has left not a wreck behind."

Then, lest us not deplore its unknown fate, but turn our attention to its successor.

The difference between the author of this Proclamation and myself, is radical and irreconcilable. He contents, that the inhabitants of these now United States are "one People." To prove this he asserts, that before the Declaration of Independence, they had formed themselves into "a nation" the existence of which was proclaimed in that act; and that afterwards, when the terms of this their first association (called now a confederation) "were reduced to form, it was in that of a solemn league of several States, by which they agreed, that they would collectively form one nation," for certain purposes which he expresses. On the other hand, I have contended, that these inhabitants are not now, nor ever were, one People, but always constituted several separate and distinct communities, which even in their colonial state, had long existed as such, and independent of each other.—That before the Declaration of Independence, these communities, impelled by a sense of common interest, and of common danger, associated themselves, not to form one nation, but by the agency