Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/138



social system. My adversaries are not for it. I am contending that the superintendence of one of the people's delegates should never desert it in the most important political operations; and my antagonists contend that one of the delegates should exclusively possess the right of making war—as if, even were the executive power a stranger to the composition of the general will, our deliberations turned only on the declaration of war, and the exercise of the right involved not a series of mixed operations, in which action and will jostle each other and are confounded.

It has been proposed to you to decide the question by a parallel between those who support the affirmative and those who support the negative. You have been told that you would see, on the one side, men who hope either for advancement in the arm„ or to be employed in transacting foreign affairs, men connected with the ministers and their agents; on the other, the peaceful citizen, virtuous, unknown, unambitious, who finds his own happiness and existence in the happiness and existence of the community.

I mean not to follow this example. I think that it is no more conformable to the expediencies of politics than it is to the principles of morality, to sharpen the poniard with which one can not wound one's rival without soon feeling the weapon returned upon one's own heart. I do not think that men who ought to serve the public cause as true brother soldiers find any pleasure in defamation and intrigue, and not in