Such is the avowed purpose of a Government which is in the practice of
naturalizing by thousands citizens of other countries, and not only of
permitting but compelling them to fight its battles against their
native country.

They have not, it is true, taken into their own hands the hatchet and
the knife, devoted to indiscriminate massacre, but they have let loose
the savages armed with these cruel instruments; have allured them into
their service, and carried them to battle by their sides, eager to glut
their savage thirst with the blood of the vanquished and to finish the
work of torture and death on maimed and defenseless captives. And, what
was never before seen, British commanders have extorted victory over
the unconquerable valor of our troops by presenting to the sympathy of
their chief captives awaiting massacre from their savage associates.
And now we find them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable
warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to
disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated
Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but
they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they
did not belong to a sense of unexampled inconsistencies might excite
the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the
very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge against the
disorganizing and insurrectional policy of its adversary.

To render the justice of the war on our part the more conspicuous, the
reluctance to commence it was followed by the earliest and strongest
manifestations of a disposition to arrest its progress. The sword was
scarcely out of the scabbard before the enemy was apprised of the
reasonable terms on which it would be resheathed. Still more precise
advances were repeated, and have been received in a spirit forbidding