“We shrink from the separation of the States as an event fraught with incalculable evils; and it is among our strongest objections to the present course of measures that they have in our opinion a very dangerous and alarming bearing on such an event. If a separation of the States ever should take place, it will be on some occasion when one portion of the country undertakes to control, to regulate, and to sacrifice the interest of another; when a small and heated majority in the government, taking counsel of their passions and not of their reason, contemptuously disregarding the interests and perhaps stopping the mouths of a large and respectable minority, shall by hasty, rash, and ruinous measures threaten to destroy essential rights and lay waste the most important interests. It shall be our most fervent supplication to Heaven to avert both the event and the occasion; and the Government may be assured that the tie that binds us to the Union will never be broken _by us_.” The conduct of England strengthened the Federalists. After the repeal of the Orders in Council became known, Monroe, July 27, authorized Jonathan Russell in London to arrange an armistice, provided the British government would consent to an informal arrangement in regard to impressments and blockades. Hardly had these instructions been sent to England, when from Albany came news that Sir George Prevost had proposed an armistice and General Dearborn had accepted it. This act compelled the President either to stop the war and disorganize his party, or to disapprove Dearborn’s armistice without prejudice to the armistice which Russell was to negotiate in London, and also without censure to General Dearborn. To Dearborn the President, as the story has shown, sent immediate orders for the renewal of hostilities; while Monroe, in fresh instructions to Jonathan Russell,[356] explained the disavowal. The explanations given by Monroe were little likely to satisfy Federalists that the Government honestly wished for peace. Monroe alleged that the repeal of the Orders in Council did not satisfy the United States, because the repeal still asserted the principle underlying the orders, which the United States could not admit; but he further maintained that any armistice, made before obtaining redress on the subject of impressments, might be taken as a relinquishment of the claim to redress, and was therefore inadmissible.