Excerpt from The Two Trials of John Fries, on an Indictment for Treason

Gentlemen of the Grand Jury,

The important duties you are now called upon to fulfil, naturally increase with the increasing difficulties of our country. But however great those difficulties may be, I am persuaded you will meet them with a firm and intrepid step, resolved, so far as you are concerned, that no dishonour or calamity (if any should await us) shall be ascribable to a weak or impartial administration of justice.

If ever any people had reason to be thankful for a long and happy enjoyment of peace, liberty and safety, the people of these states surely have. While every other country almost has been convulsed with foreign or domestic war, and some of the finest countries on the globe have been the seene of every species of vice and disorder, where no life was safe, no property was secure, no innocence had protection, and nothing but the basest crimes gave any chance for momentary preservation,; no citizen of the United States could truly say that in his own country any oppression had been permitted with impunity, or that he had any grievance to complain of, but that he was required to obey those laws which his own representatives had made, and under a government which the people themselves had chosen. But in the midst of this envied situation, we have heard the government as grossly abused as if it had been guilty of the vilest tyranny, as if common sense or common virtue had fled from our country, and those pure principles of republicanism, which have so strongly characterized its councils, could only be found in the happy foil of France, where the sacred fire is preserved by five Directors on ordinary occasions, and three on extraordinary ones who, with the aid of a republican army, secure its purity from violation by the Legislative representatives of the people. - The external conduct of that government is upon a par with its internal. - Liberty, like the religion of Mahomet, is propagated by the sword. Nations are not only compelled to be free, but to be free on the French model, and placed under French guardianship. French arsenals are the repository of their arms, French treasuries of their money, the city of Paris of their curiosities; and they are honoured with the constant support of French enterprizes in any other part of the world. Such is the progress of a power which began by declarations that it abhorred all conquests for itself, and sought no other felicity but to emancipate the world from tyrants, and leave each nation free to chuse a gorvernment of its own. Those who take no warning by such an awful example, may have deeply to lament the consequences of neglecting it.

The situation in which we now stand with that country is peculiarly critical.

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