same; but against us is that monstrous principle of armed intervention against setting up an example.  So let me therefore ask with Mr. Webster:  Are you so sick of your liberty and its effects, as to be willing to part with that doctrine upon which your very existence rests?  Do you forget what you, as a people, owe to lawful resistance? and are you willing to abandon the law and rights of society to the mercy of the allied despots, who have united to crush them everywhere?  Neutrality?  Why, indeed, that would be a strange explanation of neutrality, if you would sanction by your indifference, the hostile alliance of all despots against republican, nay, against constitutional principles on earth.

But suppose Hungary rises once more to do what Washington did (and be sure it will), and Russia interferes again and you remain again (what some of you call) neutral—­that is, you remain indifferent—­what is the consequence?  Czar Nicholas and Emperor Francis-Joseph may buy and carry away arms, ammunition, armed ships—­nay, even armed sympathizers (if they find them)—­to murder Hungary with and you will protect that commerce, and consider it a lawful one.  But if I buy the same, you don’t protect that commerce; and if I would enlist an “armed expedition,” for what the Czar may do against Hungary, you would send me to prison for ten years.

Is that neutrality?  The people of Hungary crushed by violence, shall be nothing, its sovereign right nothing; but the piracy of the Czar, encroaching upon the sacred rights of mine and many other nations, shall be regarded as legitimate, against which the United States, though grown to mighty power on earth, able without any risk of its own security to maintain the law of nations and the influence of its glorious example, should still have nothing to object, only because Washington, more than half a century ago, declared neutrality appropriate to the infant condition of his country then; and was anxious to gain time, that your country might settle and mature its recent institutions, and progress to that degree of strength, when it would be able to defy any power on earth in a just cause.

No, gentlemen, my principles may be rejected by the United States, but never will impartial history acknowledge that by doing thus the United States followed the principles of Washington.  The ruling policy of Washington may be summed up in the word “national self-preservation,” to which he, as the generous emotions of his noble breast prompted, was ever inclined to subordinate everything.

And he was right.  Self-preservation must be the chief principle of every nation.  But the means of this self-preservation are different in different times.  To-day, I confidently dare state, the duty of self-preservation commends to the United States, not to allow that the principle of absolutism should become omnipotent by having a charter guaranteed to violate the laws of nature and of nature’s God, which Washington and his heroic associates invoked, when they proclaimed the independence of this Republic.