Yes; and to search British vessels, too, that have been declared to be pirates by the laws of nations, pirates by the laws of Great Britain, pirates by the laws of the United States.

Now, it happens that behind all this exceeding great zeal against the right of search is a question which the gentleman took care not to bring into view, and that is the support and perpetuation of the African slave-trade.

That is the real question between the ministers of America and Great Britain: whether slave-traders, pirates, by merely hoisting the American flag, shall be saved from capture.

I say there is no such thing as an exemption from the right of search by the laws of nations, and I challenge and defy the gentleman to produce the proof.

And the Supreme Court of the United States, in their decisions of prize cases brought before them, sustained us in doing so, and said it was lawful according to the laws of nations.

I had then just signed with my own hand a treaty declaring 'the traffic in slaves (not the African slave-trade, but THE TRAFFIC IN SLAVES) unjust and inhuman,' and in which both nations engaged to do all in their power to suppress it.

And I will say that, although I was not myself a slaveholder, I had to resist all the slaveholding members of the cabinet, and the President also.

Monroe himself was always strongly inclined in favor of the proposition, and I maintained the opposite ground against him and the whole body of his official advisers as long as I could.

He does not immediately connect the questions of war with Mexico and war with Great Britain, but apparently knows and feels that they are in substance and in fact but one and the same question; and that, so surely as we rush into a war…

The gentleman appeared entirely conscious of that; and I hope that no member of this committee will come to the conclusion that it is possible for us to have a war with Mexico without at the same time going to war with Great Britain.

The gentleman was in favor of war, not merely for the abstract purpose of annexing Texas to the Union, but he was for war by peremptorily prohibiting Santa Anna from invading Texas.

If we go to war with Mexico, her debts to our citizens will be expunged at once, if the doctrine of the gentleman from Pennsylvania be true.

I will not compare the arguments of the two gentlemen together; but I will say, in regard to the doctrine of the gentleman from Pennsylvania, that it has quite too much of repudiation in it for my creed.

As to our debt from Mexico, I believe the way to recover it is not to go to war for it; for war, besides failing to recover the money, will occasion us the loss of ten times the amount in other ways.

And, if we go to war with Great Britain to-morrow, she will make us, as one of the conditions of peace, pay our whole debt of two hundred millions, with interest.

And, as our contests would be chiefly on the ocean, we must first obtain a superiority on the seas before we can put her down and vanquish her; and this to save ourselves from the payment of two hundred millions justly due from our…

I certainly have no objections to our minister's making such representations as he can in favor of the release of citizens of the United States, although taken in actual war against Mexico, in association with Texian forces; but I am not…

If that is to be the avowed opinion of this committee, in God's name let my constituents know it!

The sooner it is proclaimed on the house-tops, the better--the house is to go to war with Mexico for the purpose of annexing Texas to this Union!

They believed they had a high destiny to fulfil, by administering to the people, in the form of law, remedies for the sufferings which they had too long endured.

The will of one man has frustrated all their labors, and prostrated all their powers.

They see the irreconcilable difference of opinion and of action between the legislative and executive departments of the government is but sympathetic with the same discordant views and feelings among the people.

In this state of things he has assumed, as the committee fully believe, the exercise of the whole legislative power to himself, and is levying millions of money upon the people, without any authority of law.

But the final decision of this question depends neither upon legislative nor executive, but upon judicial authority; nor can the final decision of the Supreme Court upon it be pronounced before the close of the present Congress.

He shows, from the history of Massachusetts, that the fundamental principle asserted in the fifth article of our declaration of rights, that all power resides originally in the people, is derived from the above-named writers, and explains…