“Will you drive us to a repeal of the embargo, and make no resistance? Are you ready to lie down quietly under the impositions laid upon you? You have driven us from the embargo. The excitements in the East render it necessary that we should enforce the embargo with the bayonet or repeal it. I will repeal it,--and I could weep over it more than over a lost child. If you do not resist, you are no longer a nation; you dare not call yourself so; you are the merest vassals conceivable.... I appeal to the minority, who hold the destinies of the nation in their grasp,--for they can enforce embargo without the bayonet,--I beg them, if they will not declare war, that they will do the best they can for their country.” No one then wondered to see South Carolina almost on her knees before Massachusetts, beseeching her, on her own terms, for her own honor, to do the best she could for the common country; but Massachusetts had no voice to respond. Dryly, in the caustic tone of Connecticut austerity, Samuel Dana replied that the days of ancient chivalry had not yet returned. When Massachusetts at last found a spokesman, she gave her answer through the mouth of Ezekiel Bacon,--a man second to none in respectability, but not one whom, in a moment of supreme crisis, the State would naturally have chosen among all her citizens to pronounce her will. Bacon had carefully collected advice from the men in his State who were most competent to give counsel;[368] but in Massachusetts affairs at Washington were little understood. Bent only on saving the Union by forcing a repeal of the embargo, and hampered by alliance with Federalists and Pennsylvanians, Bacon could not afford to show a sense of national self-respect. He began by admitting that the discontents in New England made immediate repeal necessary:-- “It surely could not be sound policy, by adhering to this system beyond the measure of absolute necessity, to risk in the hands of any faction which might be disposed to wield it an instrument by which they may endanger the union of our country, and raise themselves to power on the ruins of liberty and the Constitution.” Such a beginning, offering a reward for threats of disunion, and conceding to traitors what would have been refused to good citizens, was an evil augury; and the rest of Bacon’s speech carried out the promise. As he refused to prolong the embargo, so he refused to vote for war. “In every point of view, the policy of declaring offensive war against any nation four months in advance is to me wholly objectionable.” The conclusion was as feeble as was required by the premises; but only some demon of bad taste could have inspired an orator at such a moment to use the language of Falstaff;--