pression of such a
nuisance. What are we to do, if the government and the whole community
is of the same description? Yet that government has thought proper to
invite ours to lay by its unjust hatred, and to listen to the voice of
humanity as taught by their example.

The operation of dangerous and delusive first principles obliges us to
have recourse to the true ones. In the intercourse between nations, we
are apt to rely too much on the instrumental part. We lay too much
weight upon the formality of treaties and compacts. We do not act much
more wisely, when we trust to the interests of men as guaranties of
their engagements. The interests frequently tear to pieces the
engagements, and the passions trample upon both. Entirely to trust to
either is to disregard our own safety, or not to know mankind. Men are
not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate
by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. It is with nations as
with individuals. Nothing is so strong a tie of amity between nation and
nation as correspondence in laws, customs, manners, and habits of life.
They have more than the force of treaties in themselves. They are
obligations written in the heart. They approximate men to men without
their knowledge, and sometimes against their intentions. The secret,
unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse holds them
together, even when their perverse and litigious nature sets them to
equivocate, scuffle, and fight about the terms of their written
obligations.

As to war, if it be the means of wrong and violence, it is the sole
means of justice amongst nations. Nothing can banish it from the world.
They who say otherwise, intending to impose upon us, do not impose upon
themselves. But it is one of the greatest objects of human wisdom to
mitigate those evils which we are unable to remove. The conformity and
analogy of which I speak, incapable, like everything else, of preserving
perfect trust and tranquillity among men, has a strong tendency to
facilitate accommodation, and to produce a generous oblivion of the
rancor of their quarrels. With this similitude, peace is more of peace,
and war is less of war. I will go further. There have been periods of
time in which communities apparently in peace with each other have been
more perfectly separated than in later times many nations in Europe have
been in the course of long and bloody wars. The cause must be sought in
the similitude th