Henry Clay was not a man of blood.  On the contrary, he was eminently pacific, both in his disposition and in his politics.  Yet he believed in the war of 1812, and his whole heart was in it.  The question occurs, then, Was it right and best for the United States to declare war against Great Britain in 1812?  The proper answer to this question depends upon another:  What ought we to think of Napoleon Bonaparte?  If Napoleon was, what English Tories and American Federalists said he was, the enemy of mankind,—­and if England, in warring upon him, was fighting the battle of mankind,—­then the injuries received by neutral nations might have been borne without dishonor.  When those giant belligerents were hurling continents at one another, the damage done to bystanders from the flying off of fragments was a thing to be expected, and submitted to as their share of the general ruin,—­to be compensated by the final suppression of the common foe.  To have endured this, and even to have submitted, for a time, to the searching of ships, so that not one Englishman should be allowed to skulk from such a fight, had not been pusillanimity, but magnanimity.  But if, as English Whigs and American Democrats contended, Napoleon Bonaparte was the armed soldier of democracy, the rightful heir of the Revolution, the sole alternative to anarchy, the legitimate ruler of France; if the responsibility of those enormous desolating wars does not lie at his door, but belongs to George III. and the Tory party of England; if it is a fact that Napoleon always stood ready to make a just peace, which George III. and William Pitt refused, not in the interest of mankind and civilization, but in that of the Tory party and the allied dynasties,—­then America was right in resenting the searching and seizure of her ships, and right, after exhausting every peaceful expedient, in declaring war.

That this was really the point in dispute between our two parties is shown in the debates, newspapers, and pamphlets of the time.  The Federalists, as Mr. Clay observed in one of his speeches, compared Napoleon to “every monster and beast, from that mentioned in the Revelation down to the most insignificant quadruped.”  The Republicans, on the contrary, spoke of him always with moderation and decency, sometimes with commendation, and occasionally he was toasted at their public dinners with enthusiasm.  Mr. Clay himself, while lamenting his enormous power and the suspension of ancient nationalities, always had a lurking sympathy with him.  “Bonaparte,” said he in his great war speech of 1813,

“has been called the scourge of mankind, the destroyer of Europe, the great robber, the infidel, the modern Attila, and Heaven knows by what other names.  Really, gentlemen remind me of an obscure lady, in a city not very far off, who also took it into her head, in conversation with an accomplished French gentleman, to talk of the affairs of Europe.  She, too, spoke