No, Sir! let the bubble burst to-morrow,—­destroy the fragile basis on which her public credit stands,—­sponge out her national debt,—­and, dreadful as would be the process, she would rise with renewed vigor from the fall, and present to her enemy a more imposing, irresistible front than ever.  No, Sir!  Great Britain cannot be subjected by France.  The genius of her institutions, the genuine game-cock, bulldog spirit of her people, will lift her head above the waves.  From this belief I acknowledge I derive a satisfaction.  In New England our blood is unmixed.  We are the direct descendants of Englishmen.  We are natives of the soil.  In the Legislature, now in session, of the once powerful and still respectable State of Massachusetts, composed of more than seven hundred members, to my knowledge not a single foreigner holds a seat.  As Great Britain wrongs us, I would fight her.  Yet I should be worse than a barbarian, did I not rejoice that the sepulchres of our forefathers, which are in that country, shall remain unsacked, and their coffins rest undisturbed, by the unhallowed rapacity of the Goths and Saracens of modern Europe.  Let us have these thirty frigates.  Powerful as Great Britain is, she could not blockade them; with our hazardous shores and tempestuous northwest gales, from November to March, all the navies in the world could not blockade them.  Divide them into six squadrons; place those squadrons in the Northern ports, ready for sea; and at favorable moments we would pounce upon her West India Islands,—­repeating the game of De Grasse and D’Estaing in ’79 and ’80.  By the time she was ready to meet us there, we would be round Cape Horn, cutting up her whalemen.  Pursued thither, we could skim away to the Indian Seas, and would give an account of her China and India ships very different from that of the French cruisers.  Now we would follow her Quebec, and now her Jamaica convoys; sometimes make our appearance in the chops of the Channel, and even sometimes wind north about into the Baltic.  It would require a hundred British frigates to watch the movements of these thirty.  Such are the means by which I would bring Great Britain to her senses.  By harassing her commerce with this fleet, we could make the people ask the Government why they continued to violate our rights; whether it were for her interest to sever the chief tie between her and us, by compelling us to become a manufacturing people (and on this head we could make an exhibition that would astonish both friends and foes); what she was to gain by forcing us prematurely to become a naval power, destined one day or other to dispute with her the sceptre of the ocean?  We could, in short, bring the people to ask the Government, For whose benefit is this war?  And the moment this is brought about on both sides of the water, the business is finished; you would only have to agree on fair and equal terms of peace.”