uences of admitting that such a contract could be binding. For
they, who had signed and ratified it, had not only glaringly exceeded
all power which could be supposed to be vested in them as holding a
military office; but, in the exercise of political functions, they had
framed ordinances which neither the government, nor the Nation, nor any
Power on earth, could confer upon them a right to frame: therefore the
contract was self-destroying from the beginning. It is a wretched
oversight, or a wilful abuse of terms still more wretched, to speak of
the good faith of a Nation as being pledged to an act which was not a
shattering of the edifice of justice, but a subversion of its
foundations. One man cannot sign away the faculty of reason in another;
much less can one or two individuals do this for a whole people.
Therefore the contract was void, both from its injustice and its
absurdity; and the party, with whom it was made, must have known it to
be so. It could not then but be expected by many that the government
would reject it. Moreover, extraordinary outrages against reason and
virtue demand that extraordinary sacrifices of atonement should be made
upon their altars; and some were encouraged to think that a government
might upon this impulse rise above itself, and turn an exceeding
disgrace into true glory, by a public profession of shame and repentance
for having appointed such unworthy instruments; that, this being
acknowledged, it would clear itself from all imputation of having any
further connection with what had been done, and would provide that the
Nation should as speedily as possible, be purified from all suspicion of
looking upon it with other feelings than those of abhorrence. The people
knew what had been their own wishes when the army was sent in aid of
their Allies; and they clung to the faith, that their wishes and the
aims of the Government must have been in unison; and that the guilt
would soon be judicially fastened upon those who stood forth as
principals, and who (it was hoped) would be found to have fulfilled only
their own will and pleasure,--to have had no explicit commission or
implied encouragement for what they had done,--no accessaries in their
crime. The punishment of these persons was anticipated, not to satisfy
any cravings of vindictive justice (for these, if they could have
existed in such a case, had been thoroughly appeased already: for what
punishment could be greater than to have brough