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71] competent relief, your Committee cannot but be forcibly impressed. They believe in the existence of those grievances, and in the cause to which they have been ascribed. They believe that this war, so fertile in calamities, and so threatening in its consequences, has been waged with the worst possible views and carried on in the worst possible manner; forming a union of wickedness and weakness, which defies for a parallel the annals of the world. We believe, also, that its worst effects are yet to come; that loan upon loan, tax upon tax, and exaction upon exaction, must be imposed, until the comforts of the present, and the hopes of the rising generation are destroyed. An impoverished people will be an enslaved People. An army of sixty thousand men, become veteran by the time the war is ended, may be the instrument, as in former times, of destroying even the forms of Liberty; and will be as easy to establish a President for life, by their arms, as it has been for four years by intrigue. We tremble for the liberties of our Country! We think it the duty of the present generation, to stand between the next and despotism.

The Committee are of opinion that the late act laying an Embargo is unconstitutional, and void in divers of its provisions; not upon the narrow ground that the constitution has expressly prohibited such acts, but upon the more broad and liberal ground that the People never gave a power to Congress to enact them.

A direct prohibition would have weakened the argument against them, because it would have indicated an apprehension, that such power might be usurped.

A power to regulate Commerce is abused, when employed to destroy it; and a manifest and voluntary abuse of power sanctions the right of resistance, as much as a direct and palpable usurpation. The sovereignty reserved to the States, was reserved to protect the Citizens from acts of violence by the United States, as well as for purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign and independent State of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without power to protect its people, and to defend them from oppression, from whatever quarter it comes. Whenever the national compact is violated, and the citizens of this state are oppressed by