Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political

ALEXANDRIA.
MONDAY MORNING, May 11.

To shew thee very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

It is amazingly mal-apropos, and moreover very vexatious, that while our sentinels of public liberty are legislating away in the "full tide of successful experiment" at Washington, their well-laid plans are failing every where! The two main sinews of their darling, war, appear to be most miserably relaxed. Neither men are to be had, nor money to pay them.-- The capitalists are walking up to the books very tardily; so are the soldiers to the drum-head. The fond hopes of a harvest of sailor-soldiers being gathered in from the distresses of the Embargo (for we can think of no other apology for the measure) will not end this time in fruition: they will sooner emigrate to a commercial country than to lower their wages two thirds, change their elements, and lose their liberty. Now if our government could contrive to infuse a little more justice and, of course, prosperity, into their cause, they would never be thus hampered for want of either men or money. As it now stands, the contemplated war will in fact be waged by a party, who, by the by, never did, in their greatest majority, hold the purse-strings of the nation. It is at this time, very problematical whether they have a majority of polls; but let one year's "unprofitable contest" be tried: let Mr. Gallatin open his next budget of ways and means, that is, loans upon compulsion, and we think it would not require a very nice calculation to inform us where the majority will then be.-- On the whole, we do not conceive the prospect before us to be near so gloomy as many others do. Looking but a little way through the curtain of futurity, and with the probability of several existing causes producing natural effects, we must confess the prospect appears to us rather cheering than otherwise. We may have to pass through the vale of the shadow of political death, but (so that we preserve our union in the passage) it will be the precursor of a brighter day than we have long witnessed. John Adams in 1812 observed to his Quincy friends,--"The prospect of national greatness is as sure and certain as that of national existence. The Union our rock of safety as well as our pledge of grandeur; and for this reason I hesitate not to recommend to you as a sentiment--"A union of honest men."