of Washington and your present grandeur, that though you may well be attached to your original principles (for the principles of liberty are everlastingly the same), yet not so in respect to the exigencies of your policy.  For if it is to be regulated by interest, your country has other interests to-day than it had then; and if ever it is to be regulated by the higher consideration of principles, you are strong enough to feel that the time is already come.  And I, standing here before you to plead the cause of oppressed humanity, am bold to declare that there may never again come a crisis, at which such an elevation of your policy would prove either more glorious to you, or more beneficial to man:  for we in Europe are apparently on the eye of that day, when either the hopes or the fears of oppressed nations will be crushed for a long time.

Having stated so far the difference of the situation, I beg leave now to assert that it is an error to suppose that non-interference in foreign matters has been bequeathed to the people of the United States by your great Washington as a doctrine and as a constitutional principle.  Firstly, Washington never even recommended to you non-interference in the sense of indifference to the fate of other nations.  He only recommended neutrality.  And there is a mighty diversity between these two ideas.  Neutrality has reference to a state of war between two belligerent powers, and it is this case which Washington contemplated, when he, in his Farewell Address, advised the people of the United States not to enter into entangling alliances.  Let quarrelling powers, let quarrelling nations go to war—­but do you consider your own concerns; leave foreign powers to quarrel about ambitious topics, or narrow partial interests.  Neutrality is a matter of convenience—­not of principle.  But while neutrality has reference to a state of war between belligerent powers, the principle of non-interference, on the contrary, lays down the sovereign right of nations to arrange their own domestic concerns.  Therefore these two ideas of neutrality and non-interference are entirely different, having reference to two entirely different matters.  The sovereign right of every nation to rule over itself, to alter its own institutions, to change the form of its own government, is a common public law of nations, common to all, and, therefore, put under the common guarantee of all.  This sovereign right of every nation to dispose of itself, you, the people of the United States must recognize; for it is the common law of mankind, in which, because it is such, every nation is equally interested.  You must recognize it, secondly, because the very existence of your great republic, as also the independence of every nation, rests upon this ground.  If that sovereign right of nations were no common public law of mankind, then your own independence would be no matter of right, but only a matter of fact, which might be subject,