policy of a nation situated like our own.  It can hardly be pretended, that the “right” for which we ask ought to be purchased at the disgraceful price of abandoning the truth.  This would be truly bargaining away a better right for another of less value.  These gentlemen of expedients may beat their brains as much as they please, they will never invent any means so simple, and so sure of attaining the great ends included in the political maxim just quoted, as by adhering to the plain, direct dictates of common honesty.  Each trifling temporary advantage they may gain, will certainly and speedily be met by some contingent disadvantage, that will render them losers by the exchange.[27]

[Footnote 27:  As respects France, the result has shown the impolicy of the temporizing system.  The French Government, finding such a disposition to compliance in the agents that were placed near it, by America, has quite reasonably inferred that the mass at home acted on the same temporizing and selfish policy, and has treated a solemn compact, that contains a tardy and very insufficient reparation, for some of the greatest outrages that were ever committed by one civilized nation on the rights of another, as a matter quite within its own control.  This consequence was foreseen by the writer, and foretold, in a letter that was written in 1832, and published as far back as the year 1833.  It was only necessary to be on the spot, and to witness the contempt and indifference engendered by this miserable policy, to predict the events which have since occurred.  The accidental situation of Europe has favoured us, and we owe the tardy reparation that has been received more to Russia than to ourselves.]

To return to France and the controversy on finance, our opponents had at length the indiscretion to publish a document that they said had been furnished them by some of their “honorables Americains” and by which they attempted to prove some one of their various positions; for by this time they had taken a great many, scarcely any two of which agreed.  I have no doubt that this document, in the present instance, did come from “Americans,” though it originally came from Captain Basil Hall.  This gentleman had appended to his travels, a table, which purported to contain an arranged statement of the cost of the state governments.  You will form some idea of the value of this table, as a political and statistical document, by an exposure of one or two of its more prominent errors.  Taking, for instance, our own state; the receipts from the property of the state, such as its canal, common school, literature, and other funds, necessarily passing through the treasury, the sum total is made to figure against us, as the annual charge of government; which, by these means, is swelled to five times the real amount.  Every one knows that the receipts of the canals alone, the moment that the conditions of the loans effected to construct them shall admit of their application, will be more than sufficient to meet the entire charges of the state government twice over; but, by this mystified statement, we are made to appear the poorer for every dollar of properly we possess!  And yet this is the nature of the evidence that some of our people furnished to the writers on the French side of this question; a side that, by their own showing, was the side of monarchy?