permit the royal wolves of devastation to run wild over
our sister republics, because, forsooth, in an evil hour, we were led
into an alliance which, under the name of a treaty, has embarrassed our
action, clouded our judgment, and involved our self-respect? Shall the
great American Nation, with its untold resources, its magnificent
capabilities, and its sublime faith in the manifest destiny of this
republic, calmly submit to the errors, mistakes, aye, blunders of its
aforetime rulers, and under a mistaken sense of honor continue to be
bound hand and foot by the terms of that pernicious treaty which might
well be called the covenant of national disgrace?

I maintain that it is an utter impossibility for a treaty-making power
to impose a permanent disability on the government for all coming time,
which, in the very nature and necessity of the case, may not be outgrown
and set aside by the laws of national progression, which all unaided
will render nugatory and vain all the plans and intentions of men. In
the language of Honorable Edward Everett, in his famous diplomatic
correspondence with the Compte De Sartiges in relation to the Island of
Cuba, in 1852, when asked to join England and France in a tripartite
treaty, in which a clause was embodied forbidding the United States from
ever acquiring or annexing that Island to this republic, "It may well be
doubted, whether the Constitution of the United States would allow the
treaty making power to impose a permanent disability on the American
government for all coming time, and prevent it under any future change
of circumstances from doing what has so often been done in the past. In
1803 the United States purchased Louisiana of France, and in 1819 they
purchased Florida of Spain. It is not within the competence of the
treaty-making power in 1852 effectually to bind the government in all
its branches, and for all coming time, not to make a similar purchase of
Cuba. There is an irresistible tide of affairs in a new country which
makes such a disposition of its future rights nugatory and vain.
America, but lately a waste, is filling up with intense rapidity, and is
adjusting on natural principles those territorial relations which, on
the first discovery of the continent, were, in a good degree,
fortuitous. It is impossible to mistake the law of American progress and
growth, or think it can be ultimately arrested by a treaty, which shall
attempt to prevent by agreement the futur