. This was gaining everything, because it
confirmed our neutrality, by which our citizens are gaining everything.
This alone would justify the engagements of the government. For, when
the fiery vapors of the war lowered in the skirts of our horizon, all
our wishes were concentred in this one, that we might escape the
desolation of the storm. This treaty, like a rainbow on the edge of the
cloud, marked to our eyes the space where it was raging, and afforded,
at the same time, the sure prognostic of fair weather. If we reject it,
the vivid colors will grow pale,--it will be a baleful meteor portending
tempest and war.

Let us not hesitate, then, to agree to the appropriation to carry it
into faithful execution.

Thus we shall save the faith of our nation, secure its peace, and
diffuse the spirit of confidence and enterprise that will augment its
prosperity. The progress of wealth and improvement is wonderful, and,
some will think, too rapid. The field for exertion is fruitful and vast,
and if peace and good government should be preserved, the acquisitions
of our citizens are not so pleasing as the proofs of their industry--as
the instruments of their future success. The rewards of exertion go to
augment its power. Profit is every hour becoming capital. The vast crop
of our neutrality is all seed-wheat, and is sown again to swell, almost
beyond calculation, the future harvest of prosperity. And in this
progress, what seems to be fiction is found to fall short of experience.

I rose to speak under impressions that I would have resisted if I could.
Those who see me will believe that the reduced state of my health has
unfitted me, almost equally for much exertion of body or mind.
Unprepared for debate, by careful reflection in my retirement, or by
long attention here, I thought the resolution I had taken to sit silent,
was imposed by necesity, and would cost me no effort to maintain. With a
mind thus vacant of ideas, and sinking, as I really am, under a sense of
weakness, I imagined the very desire of speaking was extinguished by the
persuasion that I had nothing to say. Yet, when I come to the moment of
deciding the vote, I start back with dread from the edge of the pit into
which we are plunging. In my view, even the minutes I have spent in
expostulation have their value, because they protract the crisis, and
the short period in which alone we may resolve to escape it.

I have thus been led, by my feelings, to speak more