we had offended, that everything
concerning the sacrifice in this business of national honor, and of the
most fundamental principles in the policy of negotiation, seemed wholly
to have escaped them. To this fatal hour, the contention in Parliament
appeared in another form, and was animated by another spirit. For three
hundred years and more, we have had wars with what stood as government
in France. In all that period, the language of ministers, whether of
boast or of apology, was, that they had left nothing undone for the
assertion of the national honor,--the opposition, whether patriotically
or factiously, contending that the ministers had been oblivious of the
national glory, and had made improper sacrifices of that public interest
which they were bound not only to preserve, but by all fair methods to
augment. This total change of tone on both sides of your House forms
itself no inconsiderable revolution; and I am afraid it prognosticates
others of still greater importance. The ministers exhausted the stores
of their eloquence in demonstrating that they had quitted the safe,
beaten highway of treaty between independent powers,--that, to pacify
the enemy, they had made every sacrifice of the national dignity,--and
that they had offered to immolate at the same shrine the most valuable
of the national acquisitions. The opposition insisted that the victims
were not fat nor fair enough to be offered on the altars of blasphemed
Regicide; and it was inferred from thence, that the sacrifical
ministers, (who were a sort of intruders in the worship of the new
divinity,) in their schismatical devotion, had discovered more of
hypocrisy than zeal. They charged them with a concealed resolution to
persevere in what these gentlemen have (in perfect consistency, indeed,
with themselves, but most irreconcilably with fact and reason) called an
unjust and impolitic war.

That day was, I fear, the fatal term of _local_ patriotism. On that day,
I fear, there was an end of that narrow scheme of relations called our
country, with all its pride, its prejudices, and its partial affections.
All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but
not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse, and
boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France. It is no
longer an object of terror, the aggrandizement of a new power which
teaches as a professor that philanthropy in the chair, whilst it
propagates by