head of the league.

Since then, he said, it was our destiny to fight, it became us to consider in time, how we might fight most advantageously, and best prepare for the struggles which we could not avoid. He had no doubt that our true policy, and the character of our people, led us to the ocean, as the proper field of contest, which was equally pointed out by the nature and genius of our government. That was the natural and most efficacious direction of our force. It was there that the character of the country had been most nobly sustained, that the most brilliant triumphs had been achieved, that the fairest presages of future glory had been given. The mistakes of rulers might sometimes send our brave sons to perish, in fruitless expeditions by land, among the snows and damp and dreary forests of the north, or in the pestilential swamps and morasses of the south; but the irresistible force of circumstances would soon correct their errors, and recal us to the ocean, as the true scene of our power and glory.

Since it was on maritime power, therefore, that we must rely, to maritime exertions that we should be irresistibly impelled, it behoved us to consider what were the best and most efficient means of maritime force, what was its most solid basis. Was it ships? No. Money? No. What then? He would answer, that it was a brave, hardy, and numerous class of native and patriotic seamen, bound to us by the ties of birth, education, early habit; impelled by the feelings of patriotism, and the love of glory; a class of men without which ships are useless, and which money cannot buy. And can you,

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this all-important aid? On men attracted to your service by the mere desire of wages or of gain, connected with you by no common interests or feelings, united to you by no ties of kindred or affection, mere birds of passage, which flock to your shores in the summer of peace and prosperity, and fly from you when the storm begins to howl. Danger scares them away. These men, thrown on our shores in time of peace, by their own go. vernments, who wish to get rid of the expense of maintaining them, enticed to us, by the hope of high wages and easy service, when we happen to be neutral, and their own governments at war, fly when danger approaches us, and leaves us defenceless, as far as our de fence may depend on them. On whom then can the country rely; To whom must it look, in the hour of danger? I answer, to our native citizens, attached to us by birth, education, habit, and domestic ties. These are our sure dependence. They will not leave us in the time of trial; for their affections are with us, their hearts are with us, their parents and their children are with us. On them we may rely, in our greatest extremity.

It was the object of his motion, Gen. Harper said, to foster the growth of this inestimable class of men; and thus to make the best, the most effectual, and extensive preparation, for supporting our rights on the ocean, where alone they would be effectually asserted. He wished to encourage the manufacture of native American seamen, the only production which he was willing to force, by any species of what is called protecting duty. Since there was a sort of rage for encouraging manufac tures, he wished to give it a right

direction, by encouraging the growth, not of wool carders and cotton spinners, of deformed, feeble, and diseased labourers in workshops and factories, but of hardy, gallant, and active seamen, to man our navy, and by protecting our commerce on the ocean, to enable us to import from other countries, those articles which could not be produced among ourselves, without forcing them by oppressive taxes, on nine-tenths of the community, for the benefit of the other tenth. This, in his opinion, was the true way of encouraging industry, and promoting the solid and lasting prosperity of the country: to protect all, and leave all to seek the most profitable modes, of employing their skill, labour, and capital. This protection could only be afforded by a powerful marine, which would enable our commerce to seek the most profitable markets for our own productions, and to supply us on the best terms with those of other countries. Every branch of industry would then find and preserve its proper level. To the formation of such a marine, a sufficient supply of native American freemen was essential, and that supply it was the object of his motion to secure. An object, in his opinion, of the greatest importance, in every point of view; which would, he hoped, be deemed a sufficient apology on his part, for having occupied so much, of the time of that honourable body, in this feeble, and he feared, ineffectual attempt, to procure the adoption of the measure under consideration.

On the second resolution, for requiring merchant ships to have apprentices on board, he observed, that little need now be said. Its object was the same with the first,

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to provide in time the means of naval power, by promoting the growth of native seamen; and it would be found, he believed, powerfully conducive to that end. It was a measure sanctioned by long experience, in other maritime countries, and especially in Great Britain; in whose practice and institutions we might expect to find the most useful lessons in the art of advancing naval power.

Speech of Mr. PINKNEY, in the House of Representatives, on the Treaty between the United States and Great Britain. Mr. PINKNEY said, he intended yesterday, if the state of his health had permitted, to have trespassed on the house with a short sketch of the grounds upon which he disapproved of this bill. What I could not do then, said he, I am about to endeavour now, under the pres sure nevertheless, of continuing indisposition, as well as under the influence of a natural reluctance thus to manifest an apparently ambitious and improvident hurry to lay aside the character of a listener to the wisdom of others, by which I could not fail to profit, for that of an expounder of my own humble notions, which are not likely to be profitable to any body. It is, indeed, but too probable that I should best have consulted both delicacy and discretion, if I had forborne this precipitate attempt to launch my little bark upon what an honourable member has aptly termed "the torrent of debate" which this bill has produced. I am conscious that it may with singular propriety be said of me, that I am novus hospes here, that I have scarcely begun to acquire a domicil among those whom I am undertaking to

address; and that recently transplanted thither from courts of judicature, I ought for a season to look upon myself as a sort of exotic, which time has not sufficiently familiarized with the soil to which it has been removed, to enable it to put forth either fruit or flower. However all this may be, it is now too late to be silent. I proceed, therefore, to intreat your indulgent attention to the few words with which I have to trouble you upon the subject under deliberation.

That subject has already been treated with an admirable force and perspicuity on all sides of the house. The strong power of argument has drawn aside, as it ought to do, the veil which is supposed to belong to it, and which some of us seem unwilling to disturb; and the stronger power of genius, from a higher region than that of argument, has thrown upon it all the light with which it is the prerogative of genius to invest and illustrate every thing. It is fit that it should be so; for the subject is worthy by its dignity and importance to employ in the discussion of it all the powers of the mind, and all the eloquence by which I have already felt that this assembly is distinguished. The subject is the fundamental law. We owe it to the people to labour with sincerity and diligence, to ascertain the true construction of that law, which is but a record of their will. We owe it to the obligations of the oath which has recently been imprinted upon our consciences, as well as to the people, to be obedient to that will when we have succeeded in ascertaining it. I shall give you my opinion upon this matter, with the utmost deference for the judgment of others; but at the same

time with that honest and unreserved freedom which becomes this place, and is suited to my habits.

Before we can be in a situation to decide whether this bill ought to pass, we must know precisely what it is; what it is not is obvious. It is not a bill which is auxiliary to the treaty. It does not deal with details which the treaty does not bear in its own bosom. It contains no subsidiary enactments, no dependent provisions, flowing as corollaries from the treaty. It is not to raise money, or to make appropriations, or to do any thing else beyond or out of the treaty. It acts simply as the echo of the treaty.

"Ingeminat voces, auditaque verba reportat." It may properly be called the twin-brother of the treaty; its duplicate, its reflected image, for it re-enacts with a timid fidelity, somewhat inconsistent with the boldness of its pretensions, all that the treaty stipulates, and having performed that work of supererogation, stops.-It once attempted something more, indeed; but that surplus has been expunged from it as a desperate intruder, as something which might violate, by a mis-interpretation of the treaty, that very public faith which we are now prepared to say the treaty has never plighted in any the smallest degree. In a word the bill is a fac simile of the treaty in all its clauses.

I am warranted in concluding, then, that if it be any thing but an empty form of words, it is a confirmation or ratification of the treaty; or, to speak with a more guarded accuracy, is an act to which only (if passed into a law) the treaty can owe its being. If it does not spring from the "pruritus leges ferendi," by which this body can never be afflicted, I am war

ranted in saying, that it springs from an hypothesis (which may afflict us with a worse disease) that no treaty of commerce can be made by any power in the state but congress. It stands upon that postulate, or it is a mere bubble, which might be suffered to float through the forms of legislation, and then to burst without consequence or notice.

That this postulate is utterly irreconcileable with the claims and port with which this convention comes before you, it is impossible to deny. Look at it? Has it the air or shape of a mere pledge that the president will recommend to congress the passage of such laws as will produce the effect at which it aims? Does it profess to be preliminary, or provisional, or inchoate, or to rely upon your instrumentality in the consummation of it, or to take any notice of you, however distant, as actual or eventual parties to it? No -it pretends upon the face of it, and in the solemnities with which it has been accompanied and followed, to be a pact with a foreign state, complete and self-efficient, from the obligation of which this government cannot now escape, and to the perfection of which no more is necessary than has already been done. It contains the clause which is found in the treaty of 1794, and substantially in every other treaty made by the United States under the present constitution, so as to have become a formula, that, when ratified by the president of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the senate, and by his Britannic majesty, and the respective ratifications mutually exchanged, it shall be binding and obligatory on the said states and his majesty.

It has been ratified in conformity

with that clause. Its ratifications have been exchanged in the established and stipulated mode. It has been proclaimed, as other treaties have been proclaimed, by the executive government, as an integral portion of the law of the land, and our citizens at home and abroad have been admonished to keep and observe it accordingly. It has been sent to the other contracting party with the last stamp of the national faith upon it, after the manner of former treaties with the same power, and will have been received and acted upon by that party as a concluded contract, long before your loitering legisla tion can overtake it. I protest, sir, I am somewhat at a loss to understand what this convention has been since its ratifications were exchanged, and what it is now, if our bill be sound in its principle. Has it not been, and is it not, an an unintelligible, unbaptized and unbaptizable thing, without attributes of any kind, bearing the semblance of an executed compact, but in reality a hollow fiction; a thing which no man is held to consider even as the germ of a treaty, entitled to be cherished in the vineyard of the constitution; a thing which professing to have done every thing that public honour demands, has done nothing but practise delusion? You may ransack every diplomatic nomenclature, and run through every vocabulary, whether of diplomacy or law, and you shall not find a word by which you may distinguish, if our bill be correct in its hypothesis, this "deed without a name." A plain man who is not used to manage his phrases, may, therefore, presume to say that if this convention with England be not a valid treaty, which does not stand in need of your assistance,

it is an usurpation on the part of those who have undertaken to make it; that if it be not an act within the treaty-making capacity, confided to the president and senate, it is an encroachment on the legislative rights of congress.

I am one of those who view the bill upon the table, as declaring that it is not within that capacity, as looking down upon the convention as the still-born progeny of arrogated power, as offering to it the paternity of congress, and affecting by that paternity to give to it life and strength; and as I think that the convention does not stand in need of any such filiation, to make it either strong or legitimate, that it is already all that it can become, and that useless legislation upon such a subject is vitious legislation, I shall vote against the bill. The correctness of these opinions is what I propose to establish.

I lay it down as an incontrovertible truth, that the constitution has assumed (and indeed how could it do otherwise) that the government of the United States might and would have occasion, like the other governments of the civilized world, to enter into treaties with foreign powers, upon the various subjects involved in their mutual relations; and further, that it might be, and was proper to designate the department of the government in which the capacity to make such treaties should be lodged. It has said accordingly, that the president, with the concurrence of the senate, shall possess this portion of the national sovereignty. It has, furthermore, given to the same magistrate, with the same concurrence, the exclusive creation and control of the whole machinery of diplomacy. He only, with the approbation of

the senate, can appoint a negotiator, or take any step towards negotiation. The constitution does not, in any part of it, even intimate that any other department shall possess either a constant or an occasional right to interpose in the preparation of any treaty, or in the final perfection of it. The president and senate are explicitly pointed out as the sole actors in that sort of transaction. The prescribed concurrence of the senate, and that too by a majority greater than the ordinary legislative majority, plainly excludes the necessity of congressional concurrence. If the consent of congress to any treaty had been intended, the constitution would not have been guilty of the absurdity of first putting a treaty for ratification to the president and senate exclusively, and again to the same president and senate as portions of the legislature. It would have submitted the whole matter at once to congress, and the more especially, as the ratification of a treaty by the senate, as a branch of the legislature, may be by a smaller number than a ratification of it by the same body, as a branch of the executive government. If the ratification of any treaty by the president, with the advice and consent of the senate, must be followed by a legislative ratification, it is a mere nonentity. It is good for all purposes, or for none. And if it be nothing in effect, it is a mockery by which nobody would be bound. The president and senate would not themselves be bound by it-and the ratification would at last depend, not upon the will of the president and two-thirds of the senate, but upon the will of a bare majority of the two branches of the legislature, subject to the qualified legislative control of the president.