doctrine of divine right. We do not wonder that the writer, after this "delicious declaration," thought it proper to apologize to his court-readers for expressing his approbation of the abolition of the Slave Trade, as indirectly compromising those principles of legitimacy, which make one part of the species the property of another, and which we have seen so successfully established in Europe as the basis of liberty, humanity, and social order!

July 19, 1817.

THE Opposition, it seems, with Mr. Brougham at their head, "attack all that is valuable in our institutions." So says Lord Castlereagh; and, to make the thing the more incredible, so says The Courier! They attack Sir Judkin Fitzgerald and the use of the torture; and therefore they attack all that is valuable in our institutions. They attack the system of spies and informers; and therefore they attack all that is valuable in our institutions. They object to the moral characters of such men as Castles and Oliver; and therefore they attack all that is most respectable in the country. They consider Lord Sidmouth, who is "to ac quaint us with the perfect spy o' th' time," as no conjurer, treat his circular letters and itinerant incendiaries with as little ceremony as respect; and therefore they are hostile to all that is venerable in our constituted authorities. They do not approve of the Sus pension of the Habeas Corpus, of Standing Armies, and Rotten Boroughs; and therefore they would overturn all that is most valuable in the Constitution. They say that Lord Castlereagh was connected with the measures of the Irish government in the year 1799; and they are said to hold a language "grossly libellous." They say that they do not wish the same system to be introduced by his Lordship in this country; and their principles are denounced as " of a decidedly revolutionary character." "of

They think of the present administration as Mr. Canning formerly thought of it, and they think of Mr. Canning as all the world think. Is that all? Oh no! They speak against the renewal of the Income Tax; and this, in the opinion of some persons, is attacking what is more valuable than all our other institutions put together! For our own parts, our political confession of faith on this subject is short: we neither consider Lord Castlereagh as the Constitution, nor The Courier as the Country.

But if, after all, and in spite of our teeth, we should be forced to acknowledge that Sir Judkin Fitzgerald and the use of the torture, that the system of spies and informers, that Lord Sidmouth's sagacity, circulars, and travelling delegates, that arbitrary imprisonment and solitary confinement, the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, Standing Armies, and Rotten Boroughs, Lord Castlereagh's past measures or future designs, Mr. Canning's love of liberty, and Mr. Vansittart's hankerings after the Income Tax, are all that is left valuable in our institutions, or respectable in the country, then we must say, that the more effectually the Opposition "attack all that is valuable in such institutions," the more we shall thank them; and that the sooner we can get rid of all that is " most respectable" in such a system, the less occasion we shall have to blush for the Country.

ENGLAND in 1798.

By S. T. Coleridge.

August 2, 1817.

"The Monthly Magazine tells us that this country has occasioned the death of 5,800,000 persons in Calabria, Russia, Poland, Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal. This country, reader, England! our country, our great, our glorious, our beloved country, according to this Magazine, has been the guilty

cause of all this carnage!"-So says Mr. Southey apud the Quarterly Review, 1817. Thus sings Mr. Coleridge, in his "Fears in Solitude," 1798:

"We have offended, oh! my countrymen!
We have offended very grievously,

And been most tyrannous.

Thankless too for peace;

(Peace long preserv'd by fleets and perilous seas)
Secure from actual warfare, we have lov'd
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!
Alas! for ages ignorant of all

Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague,
Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows),
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,
The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! No guess
Anticipative of a wrong unfelt,

No speculation on contingency,
However dim and vague, too vague and dim
To yield a justifying cause; and forth
(Stuff'd out with big preamble, holy names,
And adjurations of the God in Heaven),
We send our mandates for the certain death
Of thousands and ten thousand! Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war;
The best amusement for our morning's meal!
The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers
For curses, who knows scarcely words enough
To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute
And technical in victories and defeat,

And all our dainty terms for fratricide;

Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues,
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which

We join no feeling and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound;
As if the fibres of this godlike frame

Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,

Pass'd off to heaven, translated, and not killed ;-
As though he had no wife to pine for him-
No God to judge him! Therefore, evil days
Are coming on us, O my countrymen !
And what if all-avenging Providence,
Strong and retributive, should make us know
The meaning of our words; force us to feel
The desolation and the agony

Of our fierce doings!

I have told,

O Britons! O my brethren! I have told
Most bitter truth, but without bitterness.
Nor deem my zeal or factious or mistimed:
For never can true courage dwell with them,
Who playing tricks with conscience, dare not look
At their own vices. We have been too long
Dupes of a deep delusion!-Others, meanwhile,
Dote with a mad idolatry; and all

Who will not fall before their images,

And yield them worship, they are enemies
Even of their country!

Such have 1 been deem'd." *.

S. T. C.

That he might be deemed so no longer, Mr. COLERIDGE soon after became passionate for war himself; and "swell'd the war-whoop" in the Morning Post. "I am not indeed silly enough," he says, " to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (1802) was a war produced by the MORNING POST; or I should be proud to have the words inscribed on my tomb.”—Biographia Literaria, vol. i. p. 212.

ON THE EFFECTS OF WAR AND TAXES.

"Great princes have great playthings. Some have play'd

At hewing mountains into men, and some

At building human wonders mountain-high.

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at."

CowPER.

August 31, 1817.

THE whole question of the effect of war and taxes, in an economical point of view, reduces itself to the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. It is a pity that some member of the House of Commons does not move a string of resolutions on this subject, as a comment on the measures of the present, and a guide to those of future reigns. A film appears to have been spread for some time over the eyes of the nation, as to the consequences of the course they were pursuing; and a good deal of pains has been taken, by sophistry, and false statements, to perplex a very plain question. But we are not without hopes, in the following observations, of putting the merits of our debt and taxes in so clear a light, that not even the Finance Committee shall be any longer blind to them.

Labour is of two kinds, productive and unproductive :-that which adds materially to the comforts and necessaries of life, or that which adds nothing to the common stock, or nothing in proportion to what it takes away from it in order to maintain itself. Money may be laid out, and people employed in either of these two kinds of labour equally, but not, we imagine, with equal benefit to the community.-[See p. 109, &c. of this volume.]

Suppose I employ a man in standing on his head, or running up and down a hill all day, and that I give him five shillings a day for his pains. He is equally employed, equally paid, and equally gains a subsistence in this way, as if he was employed, in his original trade of a shoemaker, in making a pair of shoes