rds for
them, if my powers bore any proportion to my zeal, I would swell my
voice to such a note of remonstrance, it should reach every log-house
beyond the mountains. I would say to the inhabitants, wake from your
false security; your cruel dangers, your more cruel apprehensions are
soon to be renewed; the wounds, yet unhealed, are to be torn open again;
in the daytime, your path through the woods will be ambushed; the
darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You
are a father--the blood of your sons shall fatten your cornfield; you
are a mother--the war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle.

On this subject you need not suspect any deception on your feelings. It
is a spectacle of horror, which cannot be overdrawn. If you have nature
in your hearts, it will speak a language, compared with which all I have
said or can say will be poor and frigid.

Will it be whispered that the treaty has made me a new champion for the
protection of the frontiers? It is known that my voice as well as vote
have been uniformly given in conformity with the ideas I have expressed.
Protection is the right of the frontiers; it is our duty to give it.

Who will accuse me of wandering out of the subject? Who will say that I
exaggerate the tendencies of our measures? Will any one answer by a
sneer, that all this is idle preaching? Will any one deny, that we are
bound, and I would hope to good purpose, by the most solemn sanctions of
duty for the vote we give? Are despots alone to be reproached for
unfeeling indifference to the tears and blood of their subjects? Have
the principles on which you ground the reproach upon cabinets and kings
no practical influence, no binding force? Are they merely themes of idle
declamation introduced to decorate the morality of a newspaper essay, or
to furnish petty topics of harangue from the windows of that
state-house? I trust it is neither too presumptuous nor too late to ask.
Can you put the dearest interest of society at risk without guilt and
without remorse.

It is vain to offer as an excuse, that public men are not to be
reproached for the evils that may happen to ensue from their measures.
This is very true where they are unforeseen or inevitable. Those I have
depicted are not unforeseen; they are so far from inevitable, we are
going to bring them into being by our vote. We choose the consequences,
and become as justly answerable for them as for the measures that we
know w