these powers continue to offend the United States, and at least one
of them now threatens a Polish campaign: why should not the czar lavish
his flattering marks of friendship on a great power which he hopes to
entice into an unnatural alliance? It is not American freedom which the
czars are fond of; they court American power as naturally antagonistic
to that of England, at least on the seas. Wielded entire by a Jeff.
Davis, with all the Southern spirit of aggression, it would be to them a
more desirable object of an _entente cordiale_.

But why should we not accept the proffered aid, though the offer be
prompted by selfish motives? Threatened by a wicked interference in our
affairs, which might prove dangerous to our national existence, why
refuse additional means to guard it, though these be derived from an
impure source? Will an innocent man, attacked by assassins, repulse the
aid of one hastening to save him, on the ground that he, too, is a
murderer? Certainly not. History, too, proves it by noble examples.
Pelopidas, the Theban hero, invokes the aid of the Persian king, the
natural enemy of the Greeks; Cato, who prefers a free death by his own
hand to life under a Caesar, fights side by side with Juba, a king of
barbarians; Gustavus Adolphus, the champion of Protestantism in Germany,
acts in concert with Richelieu, the reducer of La Rochelle, its last
stronghold in France; Pulaski, who fights for freedom in Poland and dies
for it in America, accepts the aid of the sultan; Franklin calls upon
the master of the Bastille to defend the Declaration of Independence;
Ypsilanti raises the standard of Neo-Grecian liberty in hope of aid from
Czar Alexander I, and happier Hellenes obtain it from Czar Nicholas, and
conquer; the heroic defender of Rome in 1849, Garibaldi, fights in 1859,
so to say, under the lead of Louis Napoleon, the destroyer of that
republic.

But what has all this to do with the question before us? Has it come to
this? Is the cause of this great republic reduced to such extremities?
Is this nation of twenty millions of freemen, so richly endowed with all
the faculties, resources, and artificial means which constitute power,
unable to preserve its national existence, independence, and liberty,
without help from the contaminating hand of tyranny, without sacrificing
its honor by basely singing hosannas to the imperial butcher of Poland,
at the very moment when the blood of the people of Kosciuszko and
Pula