only briefly remark that a like difference exists between alliance and interference.  Every independent power has the right to form alliances, but is not under duty to do so:  it may remain neutral, if it please.  Neither alliances nor neutrality are matters of principle, but simply of policy.  They may hurt interest, but do not violate law; whereas with interference the contrary is the case.  Interference with the sovereign right of nations to resist oppression, or to alter their institutions and government, is a violation of the law of nations and of God:  therefore non-interference is a duty common to every power and every nation, and is placed under the safeguard of every power, of every nation.  He who violates that law is like a pirate:  every power on earth has the duty to chase him down as a curse to human nature.  There is not a man in the United States but would avow that a pirate must be chased down; and no man more readily than the gentlemen of trade.  A gentleman who came yesterday to honour me with the invitation of Cincinnati, that rising wonder of the West,—­with eloquence which speaks volumes in one word, designated as piracy the interference of foreign violence with the domestic concerns of a nation.  There is such a moving power in a word of truth!  That word has relieved me of many long speeches.  I no longer need to discuss the principle of your foreign policy:  there can be no doubt about what is lawful, what is a duty, against piracy.  Your naval forces are, and must be, instructed to put down piracy wherever they meet it, on whatever geographic lines, whether in European or in American waters.  You sent your Commodore Decatur for that purpose to the Mediterranean, who told the Dey of Algiers, that “if he claims powder, he will have it with the balls;” and no man in the United States imagined this to oppose your received policy.  Nobody then objected that it is the ruling principle of the United States not to meddle with European or African concerns; rather, if your government had neglected so to do, I am sure the gentlemen of trade would have been foremost to complain.  Now, in the name of all which is pleasing to God and sacred to man, if all are ready thus to unite in the outcry against a rover, who, at the danger of his own life, boards some frail ship, murders some poor sailors, or takes a few bales of cotton—­is there no hope to see a similar universal outcry against those great pirates who board, not some small cutters, but the beloved home of nations? who murder, not some few sailors, but whole peoples? who shed blood, not by drops, but by torrents? who rob, not some hundred weight of merchandize, but the freedom, independence, welfare, and the very existence of nations?  Oh God and Father of human kind! spare—­oh spare that degradation to thy children; that in their destinies some bales of cotton should more weigh than those great moralities.  Alas! what a pitiful sight!  A miserable pickpocket, a drunken highway