While these prepossessions remain, all argument is useless.  It may be heard with the ceremony of attention, and lavish its own resources, and the patience it wearies, to no manner of purpose.  The ears may be open; but the mind will remain locked up, and every pass to the understanding guarded.

Unless, therefore, this jealous and repulsive fear for the rights of the House can be allayed, I will not ask a hearing.

I cannot press this topic too far; I cannot address myself with too much emphasis to the magnanimity and candor of those who sit here, to suspect their own feelings, and, while they do, to examine the grounds of their alarm.  I repeat it, we must conquer our persuasion that this body has an interest in one side of the question more than the other, before we attempt to surmount our objections.  On most subjects, and solemn ones too, perhaps in the most solemn of all, we form our creed more from inclination than evidence.

Let me expostulate with gentlemen to admit, if it be only by way of supposition, and for a moment, that it is barely possible they have yielded too suddenly to their alarms for the powers of this House; that the addresses which have been made with such variety of forms and with so great dexterity in some of them, to all that is prejudice and passion in the heart, are either the effects or the instruments of artifice and deception, and then let them see the subject once more in its singleness and simplicity.

It will be impossible, on taking a fair review of the subject, to justify the passionate appeals that have been made to us to struggle for our liberties and rights, and the solemn exhortations to reject the proposition, said to be concealed in that on your table, to surrender them forever.  In spite of this mock solemnity, I demand, if the House will not concur in the measure to execute the treaty, what other course shall we take?  How many ways of proceeding lie open before us?

In the nature of things there are but three; we are either to make the treaty, to observe it, or break it.  It would be absurd to say we will do neither.  If I may repeat a phrase already much abused, we are under coercion to do one of them; and we have no power, by the exercise of our discretion, to prevent the consequences of a choice.

By refusing to act, we choose.  The treaty will be broken and fall to the ground.  Where is the fitness, then, of replying to those who urge upon the House the topics of duty and policy that they attempt to force the treaty down, and to compel this assembly to renounce its discretion, and to degrade itself to the rank of a blind and passive instrument in the hands of the treaty-making power?  In case we reject the appropriation, we do not secure any greater liberty of action; we gain no safer shelter than before from the consequences of the decision.  Indeed, they are not to be evaded.  It is neither just nor manly to complain that the treaty-making power has produced this coercion to act.  It is not the act or the despotism of that power—­it is the nature of things that compels.  Shall we, dreading to become the blind instruments of power, yield ourselves the blinder dupes of mere sounds of imposture?  Yet that word, that empty word, coercion, has given scope to an eloquence that, one would imagine, could not be tired and did not choose to be quieted.