Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/20

8 of blood. There are two classes of causes which may affect the safety of our present excellent system of government. The most numerous, and the most dangerous, comprise those which arise among ourselves, from our own passions, and our own vices. But these are not all. Others arise from our foreign relations. It is with nations as with individuals, their society has great influence in determining their character. Foreign relations, if pursued into the ten thousand windings and intricacies of commerce, is an endless subject. Let us consider them no farther than they may be supposed to affect the preservation of essential national rights, and the security and permanence of the Constitution. Their objects are intimately connected.

The preservation of important rights is essential to the existence of a free Constitution. As government is instituted for the defence and protection of the citizens, they will reluctantly support it, when they are taught that it is incompetent to effect these ends. The surrender of just claims, under pretence that the Constitution has not energy enough to defend them with dignity, is calumniating it in the presence of those whose attachment is so neccessary to its existence, A republican system hath no basis but the people's choice. You weaken it, therefore, when you weaken the love of it. When you render it contemptible, you finish it. It is not a labored inference drawn from premises, it is a plain first principle, that a government which cannot protect the rights of the nation cannot protect itself. Under these views, it is, that the foreign relations of the country assume such an interesting aspect.

Our ancestors, the first settlers of these states, imbibed the idea that distance and the sea had forever separated the Western from much connection with the Eastern Continent. They had no apprehension (and who then could have?) of that rapid rise to commerce and consequence which hath since made this country an important object of consideration to the politicians of Europe, and placed us in the neighborhood of the great states of the earth, America is not now a small, remote star, glimmering on the political concerns of Europe with a faint and cold beam. She is in the new firmament, shining with a brilliance which cannot be hidden, and occupying a portion of the hemisphere which cannot be disregarded. Commerce is the great magician which thus annihilates distances and unites countries which Providence seems to have separated.

The only nations on the Eastern continent which are now in a situation that enables them to annoy this country to any considerable degree, are Great Britain and France. These are the two great levers which move the world. They are the two champions contending in a last effort for victory; and the smaller nations around them, unsafe to act an independant part "within the wind of such commotion," either retire from the scene or seek shelter under the power of one of the combatants. In the progress and termination of this conflict, we have, perhaps, more interest than some, and less than others, if our passions would tempt us to believe.

Every nation, as well as every man, hath its ruling passion. It hath some darling object which it pursues in preference to all others. Here is the tender side. Touch this, and you touch a nerve which vibrates directly to the heart.

In Great Britain this ruling passion is commerce. This is the apple of her eye. Her situation indicates this employment for the support of her immense population, and habit hath completely moulded the genius of her people to the exigencies of their situation. She is powerful beyond rivalship in her navy, assiduous beyond belief in circulating her trade through every vein and artery of the commercial system. These national pursuits derterminedetermine [sic] the national character. On the subject of naval rights she is jealous, haughty, and arrogant. Touch but the hair of her head and she quarrels with you. As in