soul; traces the leading clew through all the labyrinths which your
industrious folly has devised; and you, however you may have screened
yourselves from human eyes, must be arraigned, must lift your hands, red
with the blood of those whose deaths you have procured, at the tremendous
bar of God.
John Hancock.


CXLI.

ENTERPRISE OF NEW ENGLAND.

As to the wealth, Mr. Speaker, which the colonies have drawn from the sea
by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You
surely thought those acquisitions of value; for they seemed even to excite
your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has
been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and
admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pass by the
other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have
of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the
tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest
frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking
for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the
opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged
under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland island, which seemed too
remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a
stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry.

Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated
winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line