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LESSON CXXII. 122

AMES'S SPEECH ON THE BRITISH TREATY."

1. MR. SPEAKER: If any, against all these proofs, should Inaintain, that the peace with the Indians will be stable with. out the posts, to them I will urge another reply. From arguments calculated to produce conviction, I will appeal directly to the hearts of those who hear me, and ask whether it is not already planted there? I resort especially to the convictions. of the western gentlemen, whether, supposing no posts and no treaty, the settlers will remain in security? Can they take it upon them to say, that an Indian peace, under these circumstances, will prove firm?

2. No, sir, it will not be peace, but a sword; it will be no better than a lure to draw victims within the reach of the tomahawk. On this theme my emotions are unutterable. If I could find words for them, if my powers bore any proportion to my zeal, I would swell my voice to such a note of remonstrance, that it should reach every log house beyond the mountains.

3. I would say to the inhabitants, wake from your false security; your cruel dangers, your more cruel apprehensions, are soon to be renewed; the wounds, yet unhealed, are to be torn open again. In the day-time, your path through the woods will be ambushed; the darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You are a father, the blood of your sons shall fatten your corn-field; you are a mother, the war whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle.

4. On this subject you need not suspect any deception on your feelings; it is a spectacle of horror, which cannot be overdrawn. If you have nature in your hearts, they will speak a language, compared with which all I have said, or can say, will be poor and frigid.

a Ames (Fisher;) one of the most eloquent of American statesmen and writers, a native of Dedham, Massachusetts, b British Treaty; the Treaty of 1783, executed at Paris, by Adams, Franklin, &c.

5. Will it be whispered, that the treaty has made me a new champion for the protection of the frontiers? It is known that my voice, as well as vote, have been uniformly given in conformity with the ideas I have expressed. Protection is the right of the frontiers; it is our duty to give it.

6. Who will accuse me of wandering from the subject? Who will say, that I exaggerate the tendencies of our meas. ures? Will any one answer by a sneer, that all this is idle preaching? Will any one deny, that we are bound, and I would hope to good purpose, by the most solemn sanctions of duty, for the vote we give? Are despots alone to be reproached for unfeeling indifference to the tears and blood of their subjects?

7. Have the principles on which you ground the reproach upon cabinets and kings, no practical influence, no binding force? Are they merely themes of idle declamation, introduced to decorate the morality of a newspaper essay, or to furnish pretty topics of harangue from the windows of the state-house? I trust it is neither too presumptuous nor too late to ask, Can you put the dearest interest of society to hazard, without guilt, and without remorse?

8. By rejecting the posts, we light the savage fires, we bind the victim. This day we undertake to render account to the widows and orphans whom our decision will make; to the wretches that will be roasted at the stake; to our country, and, I do not deem it too serious to say, to conscience and to God. We are answerable; and if duty be any thing more than a word of imposture, if conscience be not a bugbear, we are preparing to make ourselves as wretched as our country.

9. There is no mistake in this case, there can be none; experience has already been the prophet of events, and the cries of our future victims have already reached us. The western inhabitants are not a silent and uncomplaining sacri fice. The voice of humanity issues from the shade of the wilderness; it exclaims, that while one hand is held up to reject this treaty, the other grasps a tomahawk.

10. It summons our imagination to the scenes that will open.

It is no great effort of the imagination to conceive that events so near are already begun. I can fancy that I listen to the yells of savage vengeance and the shrieks of torture; already they seem to sigh in the western wind; already they mingle with every echo from the mountains.

LESSON CXXIII. / 23

KEEPING UP APPEARANCES.

1. My neighbor was a man of expedients, and had spent his whole life, and exhausted all his ingenuity, in that adroit presentation of pretences, which in common speech, is called keeping up appearances. In this art he was really skillful; and I often suspected then, and have really concluded since, that if he had turned half the talent to procuring an honest livelihood, which he used to ponder over his ill-dissembled poverty, it would have been better for his soul and body both. He was a man that never equivocated unless it was to keep up appearances.

2. How often have I seen him put to his trumps, steering between Scylla and Charybdis, adroitly adjusting his language so as to make an impression, without incurring a falsehood, and reduced to shifts by which none were deceived, because all understood them! At one time after a week's starvation to procure a velvet collar for his best coat, his family were sitting down to a dinner of hasty-pudding and molasses, when, unluckily, I happened to walk in without knocking; a very improper course; and the family having no time to slip away the plates and table-cloth, were taken in the very act.

3. I never saw a man more confounded. A hectic flush passed over his long, sallow cheek, like the last, sad bloom on the visage of a consumptive man. He looked, for a moment, almost like a convicted criminal; but, however, he soon recovered himself, and returned to his expedients.

4. "We thought," said he,

66 we would have a plain dinner

to-day; always to eat roast turkeys makes one sick." There was no disputing this broad maxim. But happy would it have been for this ill-fated family, if there had been no sickness among its members, either of the head or heart, but such as is produced by eating roasted turkey.

5. Yet my neighbor, with all his expedients, was a very unpopular man. Though he was always angling for public favor, he never had skill enough to put on the bait so as to conceal the hook, even to the gudgeons that floated in our shallow streams. There was a broken bridge near his habitation, and one year he was plotting and expecting to be surveyor of the highways, that he might mend it for the public convenience, at the public expense.

6. He was disappointed; and old Mr. Slider, his rival and enemy, was put in the office, who suffered the bridge to remain unrepaired, with the ungenerous sarcasm, that a man who lived in such a shattered house, might well endure to ride over a rotten bridge.

7. There was a militia company, and my neighbor was expecting to be chosen captain, especially as he had been in the revolutionary army, and had actually spoken to General Washington. But at the age of forty-one, they chose him orderly-sergeant; which office he refused, declaring with much spitting and sputtering, that he would never serve his ungrateful country again. Thus closed his military honors; he was reduced to the recessity of finding the post of virtue in a private station.

S. I have heard that the only way to cure ambition is, to starve it to death; and all the world seemed to combine to remove his favorite passion by that unwelcome medicine. Once he had determined to have a large party at his house, and he desired to get it up in the very best style. He had invited all the grandees of Bundleborough; Esquire Wilson, and his one-eyed daughter; Mrs. Butterfly, a retired milliner; Mrs. Redrose, a jolly widow; Mr. Wallflower, a broken merchant; and Captain Casket, supposed to be a pensioner on the king of Great Britain.

9. The family had raked and scraped, and twisted and turned, to procure all the money they could; his wife had sold pickled mangoes; his daughter was sent to pick up mushrooms, in the great pasture; and he disposed of about two tons of old salt hay, the remaining wheel of an old ox-cart, all his pumpkins and turnips, and about half his Indian corn, to make up the sum of fifteen dollars thirty-seven and a half cents, with which he was to shine out, for one evening at least, in all the peacock-feathers with which ingenious poverty could cover over its hide-bound, frost-bitten, hungerwasted frame.

10. He sent for all the china and glass he could beg or borrow; and Mr. Planewell, the carpenter, was summoned to repair the front gate, set up the fence, and new lay the step before the front door; but as there was very little prospect of his ever being paid, he could not come. Two of the legs of the dining-table were broken, and his daughter was ordered to glue them; but failing in that, she tied them together with a piece of fish-line, which was to be concealed by the depending table-cloth.

11. The table-cloth itself was of the finest and nicest damask; but unluckily, there was a thin spot in the middle of it, almost verging to a hole; but this was to be concealed by the mat on which was laid the great dish in the center. His wife had spent the previous week in preparation, keeping the whole house in confusion, washing, scouring, cleaning, adjusting the best chamber, where the ladies were to take off their bonnets, mending the carpet, and polishing the shovel and tongs; and, considering her means, she put things in tolerable order.

12. An old, half-blind negro woman, by the name of Joice, who had formerly waited on parties, but was now nearly superannuated, was to come and assist them; and it was stipulated that she should have the fragments of the feast, for her pay. The evening came; the company assembled; the old barn-lantern, with one broken and three cracked glasses, was hung up in the entry for an introductory light; the turkey, chickens, jellies, and confectionary, were prepared.

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