I confess, while returning home, I had sometimes fancied I might be protected by the country of which I was a native, for which I had fought, and to which I paid taxes; but I was only three-and-twenty, and did not then understand the workings of laws, particularly in a state of society that submits to have its most important interests under foreign control.  Had I received a wrong from only a Frenchman, or an Englishman, I should have fared a little better, in appearance, at least, though my money was irretrievably gone; for one political party, or the other, as the case might have been, would have held me up to ex parte sympathy, so long as it suited its purposes, or until the novelty of some new case offered an inducement to supplant me.  But I had been wronged by both belligerents; and it was soon agreed, by mutual consent, to drop the whole subject.  As for redress or compensation, I was never fool enough to seek it.  On the contrary, finding how unpopular it made a man among the merchants, to prove anything against Great Britain, just at that moment, I was wisely silent, thus succeeding in saving my character, which would otherwise have followed my property, as the shortest method of making a troublesome declaimer hold his tongue.

Most young persons will doubtless hesitate to believe that such a state of things could ever have existed in a nation calling itself independent; but, in the first place, it must be remembered, that the passions of factions never leave their followers independent of their artifices and designs; and, in the next place, all who knew the state of this country in 1804, must admit it was not independent in mind of either England or France.  Facts precede thought in everything among us; and public opinion was as much in arrears of the circumstances of the country, then, as—­as—­to what shall I liken it?—­why, as it is to-day.  I know no better or truer parallel.  I make no doubt that the same things would be acted over again, were similar wrongs to be committed by the same powerful belligerents.

Marble was ludicrously enraged at these little instances of the want of true nationality in his countrymen.  He was not a man to be bullied into holding his tongue; and, for years afterwards, he expressed his opinions on the subject of an American’s losing his ship and cargo, as I had lost mine, without even a hope of redress, with a freedom that did more credit to his sense of right, than to his prudence.  As for myself, as has just been said, I never even attempted to procure justice.  I knew its utter hopelessness; and the Dawn and her cargo went with the hundreds of other ships and cargoes, that were sunk in the political void created by the declaration of war, in 1812.