preponderance from the acquisition of Canada and that section of the union, which the southern and western states have already felt so severely in the apportionment bill.

[Mr. Randolph here adverted to the defenceless state of the sea-ports, and particularly of the Chesapeake, and observed, that there was but a single spot on either shore, which could be considered in tolerable security.]

Permit me now, sir, to call your attention to the subject of our black population. I will touch this subject as tenderly as possible. It is with reluctance that I touch it at all; but in cases of great emergency, the state physician must not be deterred by a sickly, hysterical humanity, from probing the wound of his patient he must not be withheld by a fastidious and mistaken delicacy from representing his true situation to his friends, or even to the sick man himself, when the occasion calls for it. What is the situation of the slave-holding states? During the war of the revolution, so fixed were their habits of subordination, that while the whole country was overrun by the enemy, who invited them to desert, no fear was ever entertained of an insurrection of the slaves. During a war of seven years, with our country in possession of the enemy, no such danger was ever apprehended. But should we, therefore, be unobservant spectators of the progress of society within the last twenty years; of the silent, but powerful change wrought, by time and chance, upon its composition and temper? When the fountains of the great deep of abomination were broken up, even the poor slaves did not escape the general deluge. The French revolution has polluted even them. Nay, there have not been wanting men in this House, witness our legislative Legendre, the butcher who once held a seat here, to preach upon this floor these imprescriptible rights to a crowded audience of blacks in the galleries; teaching them, that they are equal to

their masters; in other words, advising them to cut their throats. Similar doctrines have been disseminated by pedlars from New England and elsewhere, throughout the southern country: and masters have been found so infatuated, as by their lives and conversation, by a general contempt of order, morality and religion, unthinkingly to cherish these seeds of self-destruction to them and their families. What has been the consequence? Within the last ten years, repeated alarms of insurrection among the slaves; some of them awful indeed. From the spreading of this infernal doctrine, the whole southern country has been thrown into a state of insecurity. Men, dead to the operation of moral causes, have taken away from the poor slave his habits of loyalty and obedience to his master, which lightened his servitude by a double operation; beguiling his own cares and disarming his master's suspicions and severity: and now, like true empirics in politics, you are called upon to trust to the mere physical strength of the fetter which holds him in bondage. You have deprived him of all moral restraint; you have tempted him to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, just enough to perfect him in wickedness; you have opened his eyes to his nakedness; you have armed his nature against the hand that has fed, that has clothed him, that has cherished him in sickness; that hand, which before he became a pupil of your school, he had been accustomed to press with respectful affection. You have done all thisand then show him the gibbet and the wheel, as incentives to a sullen, repugnant obedience. God forbid, sir, that the southern states should ever see an enemy on their shores, with these infernal principles of French fraternity in the van. While talking of taking Canada, some of us are shuddering for our own safety at home. I speak from facts, when I say, that the night-bell never tolls for fire in Richmond, that the mother does not hug her infant more closely to her bosom. I have been a witness of some of the alarms in the capital of Virginia.

How have we shown our sympathy with the patriots of Spain, or with the American provinces? By seizing on one of them, her claim to which we had formerly respected, as soon as the parent country was embroiled at home. Is it thus we yield them assistance against the arch-fiend, who is grasping at the sceptre of the civilized world? The object of France is as much Spanish-America as old Spain herself. Much as I hate a standing army, I could almost find it in my heart to vote one, could it be sent to the assistance of the Spanish patriots.

[Mr. Randolph then proceeded to notice the unjust and illiberal imputation of British attachments, against certain characters in this country, sometimes insinuated in that House, but openly avowed out of it.]

Against whom are these charges brought? Against men, who in the war of the revolution, were in the councils of the nation, or fighting the battles of your country. And by whom are they made? By runaways chiefly from the British dominions, since the breaking out of the French troubles. It is insufferable. It cannot be borne. It must and ought, with severity, to be put down in this House; and out of it to meet the lie direct. We have no fellow-feeling for the suffering and oppressed Spaniards! Yet even them we do not reprobate. Strange! that we should have no objection to any other people or government, civilized or savage, in the whole world! The great autocrat of all the Russias, receives the homage of our high consideration. The Dey of Algiers and his divan of pirates, are very civil, good sort of people, with whom we find no difficulty in maintaining the relations of peace and amity. "Turks, Jews and Infidels," Melimelli or the Little Turtle: barbarians and savages of every clime and color, are welcome to our arms. With chiefs of banditti, negro or mulatto, we can treat and can trade. Name, however, but England, and all our antipathies are up in arms against her. Against whom? Against those whose blood runs in our veins in common with whom, we claim Shakes

peare and Newton, and Chatham, for our countrymen : whose form of government is the freest on earth, our own only excepted; from whom every valuable principle of our own institutions has been borrowed-representation-jury trial-voting the supplies-writ of habeas corpus-our whole civil and criminal jurisprudence against our fellow protestants, identified in blood, in language, in religion with ourselves. In what school did the worthies of our land, the Washingtons, Henrys, Hancocks, Franklins, Rutledges of America, learn those principles of civil liberty, which were so nobly asserted by their wisdom and valor? American resistance to British usurpation has not been more warmly cherished by these great men and their compatriots; not more by Washington, Hancock and Henry, than by Chatham and his illustrious associates in the British parliament. It ought to be remembered, too, that the heart of the English people was with us. It was a selfish and corrupt ministry, and their servile tools, to whom we were not more opposed than they were. I trust that none such may ever exist among us; for tools will never be wanting to subserve the purposes, however ruinous or wicked, of kings and ministers of state. I acknowledge the influence of a Shakespeare and a Milton upon my imagination, of a Locke upon my understanding, of a Sidney upon my political principles, of a Chatham upon qualities which, would to God, I possessed in common with that illustrious man! of a Tillotson, a Sherlock and a Porteus, upon my religion. This is a British influence which I can never shake off. I allow much to the just and honest prejudices growing out of the revolution. But by whom have they been suppressed, when they ran counter to the interests of my country? By Washington. By whom, would you listen to them, are they most keenly felt? By felons escaped from the jails of Paris, Newgate and Kilmainham, since the breaking out of the French revolution; who, in this abused and insulted country, have set up for political

teachers, and whose disciples give no other proof of their progress in republicanism, except a blind devotion to the most ruthless military despotism that the world ever saw. These are the patriots, who scruple not to brand with the epithet of tory, the men, (looking towards the seat of Col. Stewart,) by whose blood your liberties have been cemented. These are they, who hold in such keen remembrance the outrages of the British armies, from which many of them are deserters. Ask these self-styled patriots where they were during the American war, (for they are, for the most part, old enough to have borne arms,) and you strike them dumb; their lips are closed in eternal silence. If it were allowable to entertain partialities, every consideration of blood, language, religion and interest, would incline us towards England: and yet, shall they be alone extended to France and her ruler, whom we are bound to believe a chastening God suffers as the scourge of a guilty world! On all other nations he tramples; he holds them in contempt; England alone he hates; he would, but he cannot despise her; fear cannot despise; and shall we disparage our ancestors? Shall we bastardize ourselves by placing them even below the brigands of St. Domingo ?-with whom Mr. Adams negociated a sort of treaty, for which he ought to have been, and would have been impeached, if the people had not previously passed sentence of disqualification for their service upon him. This antipathy to all that is English, must be French.

But the outrages and injuries of England-bred up in the principles of the revolution, I can never palliate, much less defend them. I well remember flying, with my mother and her new born child, from Arnold and Philips-and we were driven by Tarleton and other British Pandours, from pillar to post, while her husband was fighting the battles of his country. The impression is indelible on my memory: and yet, (like my worthy old neighbor, who added seven buckshot to every cartridge at the battle of Guilford, and drew a