desire of our people, was to enjoy the advantages of neutrality.  This instrument, however misrepresented, affords America that inestimable security.  The causes of our disputes are either cut up by the roots, or referred to a new negotiation after the end of the European war.  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 at length than I intended.  Yet I have, perhaps, as little personal interest in the event as any one here.  There is, I believe, no member who will not think his chance to be a witness of the consequences greater than mine.  If, however, the vote shall pass to reject, and a spirit should rise, as it will, with the public disorders, to make confusion worse confounded, even I, slender and almost broken as my hold upon life is, may outlive the government and constitution of my country.