But why should we not accept the proffered aid, though the offer be prompted by selfish motives? Threatened by a wicked interference in our affairs, which might prove dangerous to our national existence, why refuse additional means to guard it, though these be derived from an impure source? Will an innocent man, attacked by assassins, repulse the aid of one hastening to save him, on the ground that he, too, is a murderer? Certainly not. History, too, proves it by noble examples. Pelopidas, the Theban hero, invokes the aid of the Persian king, the natural enemy of the Greeks; Cato, who prefers a free death by his own hand to life under a Cæsar, fights side by side with Juba, a king of barbarians; Gustavus Adolphus, the champion of Protestantism in Germany, acts in concert with Richelieu, the reducer of La Rochelle, its last stronghold in France; Pulaski, who fights for freedom in Poland and dies for it in America, accepts the aid of the sultan; Franklin calls upon the master of the Bastille to defend the Declaration of Independence; Ypsilanti raises the standard of Neo-Grecian liberty in hope of aid from Czar Alexander I, and happier Hellenes obtain it from Czar Nicholas, and conquer; the heroic defender of Rome in 1849, Garibaldi, fights in 1859, so to say, under the lead of Louis Napoleon, the destroyer of that republic.
But what has all this to do with the question before us? Has it come to this? Is the cause of this great republic reduced to such extremities? Is this nation of twenty millions of freemen, so richly endowed with all the faculties, resources, and artificial means which constitute power, unable to preserve its national existence, independence, and liberty, without help from the contaminating hand of tyranny, without sacrificing its honor by basely singing hosannas to the imperial butcher of Poland, at the very moment when the blood of the people of Kosciuszko and Pulaski cries to Heaven and mankind for vengeance? Is the peril so great? so imminent? Is Hannibal _ante portas_? Has the French fleet dispersed Secretary Welles's five hundred and eighty-eight vessels of war, broken the Southern blockade, and appeared before our Northern harbors? Are all Jeff. Davis's bitter complaints against the English cabinet but a sham, covering a deep-laid conspiracy with treacherous Albion? Is Emperor Maximilian quietly seated on the throne of Montezuma, and already marching his armies upon the Rio Grande? The talk of foreign intervention has been going on for years, and not a threatening cloud is yet to be seen on our horizon. Both England and France deprecate the idea of hostile interference in American affairs. It is _Russia_ that is _menaced_, an alliance with her can serve only herself, and her artifices have caused all the foolish clamor that threatens to disgrace this country.