lishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies. Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing; establishing (with powers so disposed, in order to give trade a stable course, to define the rights of our merchants, and to enable the government to support them) conventional rules of intercourse, the best that present circumstances and mutual opinion will permit, but temporary, and liable to be from time to time abandoned or varied, as experience and circumstances shall dictate; constantly keeping in view that it is folly in one nation to look for disinterested favors from another; that it must pay with a portion of its independence for whatever it may accept under that character; that, by such acceptance, it may place itself in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more. There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard.

In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit,

some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism;-this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.

How far in the discharge of my official duties I have been guided by the principles which have been delineated, the public records and other evidences of my conduct must witness to you and to the world. To myself, the assurance of my own conscience is that I have at least believed myself to be guided by them.

In relation to the still subsisting war in Europe, my proclamation of the twenty-second of April, 1793, is the index of my plan. Sanctioned by your approving voice, and by that of your representatives in both Houses of Congress, the spirit of that measure has continually governed me, uninfluenced by any attempts to deter or divert me from it.

After deliberate examination, with the aid of the best lights I could obtain, I was well satisfied that our country, under all the circumstances of the case, had a right to take, and was bound in duty and interest to take, a neutral position. Having taken it, I determined, as far as should depend upon me, to maintain it, with moderation, perseverance, and firmness.

The considerations which respect the right to hold this conduct, it is not necessary on this occasion to detail. I will only observe that, according to my understanding of the matter, that right, so far from being denied by any of the belligerent powers, has been virtually admitted by all.

The duty of holding a neutral conduct may be inferred,

without anything more, from the obligation which justice and humanity impose on every nation, in cases in which it is free to act, to maintain inviolate the relations of peace and amity toward other nations.

The inducements of interest for observing that conduct will best be referred to your own reflections and experience. With me a predominant motive has been to endeavor to gain time to our country to settle and mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress without interruption to that degree of strength and consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly speaking, the command of its own fortunes. Tho, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty-five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.

Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love toward it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

ON THE POLITICAL SITUATION

BY JOHN JAMES INGALLS

MR. PRESIDENT:-Two portentous perils threaten the safety, if they do not endanger the existence of the republic. The first of these is ignorant, debased, degraded, spurious, and sophisticated suffrage; suffrage contaminated by the feculent sewage of decaying nations; suffrage intimidated and suppressed in the South; suffrage impure and corrupt, apathetic and indifferent, in the great cities of the North, so that it is doubtful whether there has been for half a century a presidential election in this country that expressed the deliberate and intelligent judgment of the whole body of the American people.

In a newspaper interview a few months ago, in which I commented upon these conditions and alluded to the efforts of the bacilli doctors of politics, the bacteriologists of our system, who endeavor to cure the ills under which we suffer by their hypodermic injections of the lymph of independent non-partizanship and the Brown-Séquard elixir of civilservice reform, I said that "the purification of politics" by such methods as these was an "iridescent dream." Remembering the cipher dispatches of 1877 and the attempted purchase of the electoral votes of many Southern States in that campaign, the forgery of the Morey letter in 1880, by which Garfield lost the votes of three states in the North, and the characterization and portraiture of Blaine and Cleveland and Harrison by their political adversaries, Į added that "the Golden Rule and the Decalog had no place in American political campaigns."

It seems superfluous to explain, Mr. President, that in those utterances I was not inculcating a doctrine, but describing a condition. My statement was a statement of facts as I understood them, and not the announcement of an article of faith. But many reverend and eminent divines, many disinterested editors, many ingenuous orators, perverted those utterances into the personal advocacy of impurity in politics.

I do not complain, Mr. President. It was, as the world goes, legitimate political warfare; but it was an illustration of the truth that there ought to be purification in our politics, and that the Golden Rule and the Decalog ought to have a place in political campaigns. "Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you" is the supreme injunction, obligatory upon all. "If thine enemy smite thee upon one cheek turn to him the other" is a sublime and lofty precept. But I take this occasion to observe that until it is more generally regarded than it has been or appears likely to be in the immediate future, if my political enemy smites me upon one cheek, instead of turning to him the other I shall smite him under the butt end of his left ear if I can. If this be political immorality, I am to be included among the unregenerated.

The election bill that was under consideration a few days ago is intended to deal with one part of the great evil to which I have alluded, but it is an imperfect, a partial, and an incomplete remedy. Violence is bad; but fraud is no better, and it is more dangerous because it is more insidious.

Burke said in one of those immortal orations that emptied the House of Commons, but which will be read with admiration so long as the English tongue shall endure, that when the laws of Great Britain were not strong enough to