of piracy.  There are many things which men do not approve, that they must do to avoid a greater evil.  To argue from thence that they are to act in the same manner in all cases is turning necessity into a law.  Upon what is matter of prudence, the argument concludes the contrary way.  Because we have done one humiliating act, we ought with infinite caution to admit more acts of the same nature, lest humiliation should become our habitual state.  Matters of prudence are under the dominion of circumstances, and not of logical analogies.  It is absurd to take it otherwise.

I, for one, do more than doubt the policy of this kind of convention with Algiers.  On those who think as I do the argument ad hominem can make no sort of impression.  I know something of the constitution and composition of this very extraordinary republic.  It has a constitution, I admit, similar to the present tumultuous military tyranny of France, by which an handful of obscure ruffians domineer over a fertile country and a brave people.  For the composition, too, I admit the Algerine community resembles that of France,—­being formed out of the very scum, scandal, disgrace, and pest of the Turkish Asia.  The Grand Seignior, to disburden the country, suffers the Dey to recruit in his dominions the corps of janizaries, or asaphs, which form the Directory and Council of Elders of the African Republic one and indivisible.  But notwithstanding this resemblance, which I allow, I never shall so far injure the Janizarian Republic of Algiers as to put it in comparison, for every sort of crime, turpitude, and oppression, with the Jacobin Republic of Paris.  There is no question with me to which of the two I should choose to be a neighbor or a subject.  But. situated as I am, I am in no danger of becoming to Algiers either the one or the other.  It is not so in my relation to the atheistical fanatics of France.  I am their neighbor; I may become their subject.  Have the gentlemen who borrowed this happy parallel no idea of the different conduct to be held with regard to the very same evil at an immense distance and when it is at your door? when its power is enormous, as when it is comparatively as feeble as its distance is remote? when there is a barrier of language and usages, which prevents corruption through certain old correspondences and habitudes, from the contagion of the horrible novelties that are introduced into everything else?  I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu.  I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the Tower.  But if, by Habeas Corpus, or otherwise, he was to come into the lobby of the House of Commons whilst your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise who would not gladly make your escape out of the back windows.  I certainly should dread more from a wild-cat in my bedchamber than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers.