How can we make professions for ourselves, and offer exhortations to the House, that no influence should be felt but that of duty, and no guide respected but that of the understanding, while the peal to rally every passion of man is continually ringing in our ears?

Our understandings have been addressed, it is true, and with ability and effect; but, I demand, has any corner of the heart been left unexplored?  It has been ransacked to find auxiliary arguments, and, when that attempt failed, to awaken the sensibilities that would require none.  Every prejudice and feeling has been summoned to listen to some peculiar style of address; and yet we seem to believe and to consider as an affront a doubt that we are strangers to any influence but that of unbiased reason.

It would be strange that a subject which has aroused in turn all the passions of the country should be discussed without the interference of any of our own.  We are men, and, therefore, not exempt from those passions; as citizens and representatives we feel the interests that must excite them.  The hazard of great interests cannot fail to agitate strong passions.  We are not disinterested; it is impossible we should be dispassionate.  The warmth of such feelings may becloud the judgment, and, for a time, pervert the understanding.  But the public sensibility, and our own, has sharpened the spirit of inquiry, and given an animation to the debate.  The public attention has been quickened to mark the progress of the discussion, and its judgment, often hasty and erroneous on first impressions, has become solid and enlightened at last.  Our result will, I hope, on that account, be the safer and more mature, as well as more accordant with that of the nation.  The only constant agents in political affairs are the passions of men.  Shall we complain of our nature—­ shall we say that man ought to have been made otherwise?  It is right already, because he, from whom we derive our nature, ordained it so; and because thus made and thus acting, the cause of truth and the public good is the more surely promoted.

But an attempt has been made to produce an influence of a nature more stubborn and more unfriendly to truth.  It is very unfairly pretended, that the constitutional right of this house is at stake, and to be asserted and preserved only by a vote in the negative.  We hear it said that this is a struggle for liberty, a manly resistance against the design to nullify this assembly and to make it a cipher in the government; that the President and Senate, the numerous meetings in the cities, and the influence of the general alarm of the country, are the agents and instruments of a scheme of coercion and terror, to force the treaty down our throats, though we loathe it, and in spite of the clearest convictions of duty and conscience.