war against Great Britain in 1812? The proper answer to this question
depends upon another: What ought we to think of Napoleon Bonaparte? If
Napoleon _was_, what English Tories and American Federalists said he
was, the enemy of mankind,--and if England, in warring upon him, _was_
fighting the battle of mankind,--then the injuries received by neutral
nations might have been borne without dishonor. When those giant
belligerents were hurling continents at one another, the damage done
to bystanders from the flying off of fragments was a thing to be
expected, and submitted to as their share of the general ruin,--to be
compensated by the final suppression of the common foe. To have
endured this, and even to have submitted, for a time, to the searching
of ships, so that not one Englishman should be allowed to skulk from
such a fight, had not been pusillanimity, but magnanimity. But if, as
English Whigs and American Democrats contended, Napoleon Bonaparte was
the armed soldier of democracy, the rightful heir of the Revolution,
the sole alternative to anarchy, the _legitimate_ ruler of France; if
the responsibility of those enormous desolating wars does not lie at
his door, but belongs to George III. and the Tory party of England; if
it is a fact that Napoleon always stood ready to make a just peace,
which George III. and William Pitt refused, _not_ in the interest of
mankind and civilization, but in that of the Tory party and the allied
dynasties,--then America was right in resenting the searching and
seizure of her ships, and right, after exhausting every peaceful
expedient, in declaring war.

That this was really the point in dispute between our two parties is
shown in the debates, newspapers, and pamphlets of the time. The
Federalists, as Mr. Clay observed in one of his speeches, compared
Napoleon to "every monster and beast, from that mentioned in the
Revelation down to the most insignificant quadruped." The Republicans,