to respect her rights, and thereby saved the principal entirely, to say nothing of all the other immense losses dependent on an interrupted trade; but demagogues were at work with their raven throats, and it is not reasonable to expect that the masses can draw very just distinctions on the subject of remote interests, when present expenditure is the question immediately before them.  It is true, I remember a modern French logician, who laid down the dogma that the tendency of democracies being to excesses, if you give a people the power, they would tax themselves to death; but, however true this theory may be in the main, it certainly is not true quoad the good citizens of the great model republic.  It was bad enough to be accursed with a spurious economy; but this was not the heaviest grievance that then weighed upon the national interests.  The demon of faction, party spirit, was actively at work in the country; and it was almost as rare to find a citizen who was influenced purely by patriotic and just views, as it would be to find an honest man in the galleys.  The nation, as a rule, was either English or French.  Some swore by the First Consul, and some by Billy Pitt.  As for the commercial towns, taken in connection with the upper classes, these were little more than so many reflections of English feeling, exaggerated and rendered still more factitious, by distance.  Those who did not swallow all that the English tories chose to pour down their throats, took the pillules Napoleons without gagging.  If there were exceptions, they were very few, and principally among travelled men—­pilgrims who, by approaching the respective idols, had discovered they were made by human hands!

Impressment at sea, and out of neutral vessels, was revived, as a matter of course, with the renewal of the war and all American ships felt the expediency, of avoiding cruisers that might deprive them of their men.  Strange as it may seem, a large and leading class of Americans justified this claim of the English, as it was practised on board their own country’s vessels!  What will not men defend when blinded and excited by faction?  As this practice was to put the mariner on the defensive, and to assume that every man was an Englishman who could not prove, out on the ocean, a thousand miles from land perhaps, that he was an American, it followed that English navy officers exercised a jurisdiction over foreigners and under a foreign flag, that would not be tolerated in the Lord High Chancellor himself, in one of the streets of London; that of throwing the burthen of proving himself innocent, on the accused party!  There was an abundance of other principles that were just as obvious, and just as unanswerable as this, which were violated by the daily practices of impressment, but they all produced no effect on the members of Congress and public writers that sustained the right of the English, who as blindly espoused one side of the main question as their opponents espoused the other.  Men acting under the guidance of factions are not compos mentis.