& none others, will yield to your solicitations. And these are they whom you are allowing to join ranks, by holding out to them inducements & bounties with one hand, while with the other you are driving thither the honest & worthy members of your own community, under the lash & scourge of conscription. In the line of your army, with the true levelling of despotism, you propose a promiscuous mixture of the worthy & the worthless, the virtuous & the profligate; the husbandman, the merchant, the mechanic of your own country, with the beings whom war selects from the excess of European population, who possess neither interests, feelings or character in common with your own people, & who have no other recommendation to your notice than their propensity to crimes.
Nor is it, Sir, for the defense of his own house & home, that he who is the subject of military draft is to perform the task allotted to him. You will put him upon a service equally foreign to his interests & abhorrent to his feelings. With his aid you are to push your purposes of conquest. The battles which he is to fight are the battles of invasion; battles which he detests perhaps & abhors, less from the danger & the death that gathers over them, & the blood with which they drench the plain, than from the principles in which they have their origin. Fresh from the peaceful pursuits of life, & yet a soldier but in name, he is to be opposed to veteran troops, hardened under every scene, inured to every privation & disciplined in every service. If, Sir, in this strife he fall—if, while ready to obey every rightful command of Government, he is forced from his home against right, not to contend for the defense of his country, but to prosecute a miserable & detestable project of invasion, & in that strife he fall, 'tis murder. It may stalk above the cognizance of human law, but in the sight of Heaven it is murder; & though millions of years may roll away, while his ashes & yours lie mingled together in the earth, the day will yet come, when his spirit & the spirits of his children must be met at the bar of omnipotent justice. May God, in his compassion, shield me from any participation in the enormity of this guilt.
I would ask, Sir, whether the supporters of these measures have well weighed the difficulties of their undertaking. Have they considered whether it will be found easy to execute laws which bear such marks of despotism on their front, & which will be so productive of every sort & degree of misery in their execution? For one, Sir, I hesitate not to say, that they can not be
