Great powers may remain neutral in a particular case, but they cannot take neutrality for a constant principle, and they chiefly cannot remain neutral in respect to principles.

Great powers can never play with impunity the part of no power at all.

Neutrality when taken as a principle means indifference to the condition of the world.

Indifference of a great power to the condition of the world is a chance given to foreign powers to regulate the interests of that indifferent foreign power.

Look in what light you appear before the world with your policy of indifference.  Look at the instructions of your navy in the Mediterranean, recently published, forbidding American officers even to speak politics in Europe.  Look at the correspondences of your commodores and consuls, frightened to their very souls that a poor exile on board an American ship is cheered by the people of Italy and France, and charging him for the immense crime of having met sympathy without any provocation on his part.  Look at the cry of astonishment of European writers, that Americans in Europe are so little republican.  Look how French Napoleonist papers frown indignantly at the idea that the Congress of the United States dare to honour my humble self.  Look how they consider it almost an insult, that an American Minister, true to his always professed principles, dares to speak about European politics.  Look how one of my aristocratical antagonists, who quietly keeps house in France, where I was not permitted to pass, and who, a tool in other hands, would wish to check my endeavours to benefit my country, because he would like to get home in some other way than by a revolution and into a republic—­look how he, from Paris in London papers, dares to scorn the idea that America could pretend to weigh anything in the scale of European events.

Do you like this position, free republicans of America?  And yet that is your position in the world now, and that position is the consequence of your adhering to your policy of indifference, at a time when you needed to act like a power on earth.

Remember the Sibylline books.  The first three were burned when you silently let Russian interference be accomplished in Hungary, and did not give us your recognition when we had achieved and declared our independence.

Six books yet remain.  The spirit of the age, the Sibylla of opportunity, holds a second three books over the fire.  Do not allow her to burn them—­else only the last three remain, and I fear you will have, without profit, more to pay for them than would have bought all the nine, and with them the glory and happiness of an eternal, mighty Republic!

Gentlemen, I humbly thank you for your kindness, and bid you an affectionate farewell.

* * * * *

XXXV.—­CATHOLICISM VERSUS JESUITISM.

[At St. Louis, (Missouri.)]