rival empire. This, then, is the broad occasion of the war; for it is a misconception, but a misconception into which the enemy has not been sparing of art or industry to mislead the world, to imagine that the question between us has turned on any single point, or on any one particular possession. Malta was, indeed, the most prominent and ostensible feature in the discussions which preceded the renewal of hostilities; but Malta was in truth but the last Feather which broke at length the overloaded back of British patience. The war itself had a deeper root. The true provocation to that war, that provocation which left no option and admitted of no delay, is to be found in the larger and more general ground to which I have just adverted; in the unheard-of extent already acquired to the French dominion; in the yet unsatis fied and insatiable ambition of that power; but above all, in her irreconcileable, bitter, and rancorous hatred of the British nation. -The French government would, no doubt, have preferred the insidious course in which it had found so many facilities, to the hazard of open war. The wish of France, it must be presumed, would have been to advance, rather circuitously than directly, and, as it were, in front, to her aim. This policy is obvious; for her recent experience must naturally have indoced an expectation, that by these means she might obtain a yet further prolongation of that acquiescence to which she was accustomed in those more remore, but not less certain preparations of our ruin.

But

in truth she appears to have been hurried down the stream of her successes, a little beyond, perhaps, the precise line of her own more deliberate system. Having accomplished her views on the Continent; having consolidated her immense power in Europe, unopposed, and with more celerity than her calculations could have promised, or a sounder policy might, perhaps, have advised, she found herself suddenly arrived at that precise point of her process, which distinctly threatened the dearest and most essential interests of Great Britain. very next shaft, though still aimed a little obliquely, was to have been a deadly one indeed. She was to resume the possession of Malta; from thence to have resettled her power in Egypt; and, from that favourable position, to have certainly and instantly disturbed, but as she hoped, and, to say the truth, as she frankly enough but insultingly declared, to have ultimately subverted our empire in the East. Here then we found at length the utmost term of pacific endu

The

rance. Here it was at least impossible that our own government should consent to be come the very instrument of such designs; to lend their hand, and put their shoulder, as it were, by the voluntary surrender of Malta (a demand wholly unwarranted in those circumstances by the treaty), not only to the certain, but to the prompt and ap proaching ruin of the nation. Here then the stand was made. There are those who may have thought it should have been made earlier; but let me ask, where is that Englishman to be found who would have wished it deferred a day later? France then interrupted in her slower, but less arduous and more certain plan of hostility; disturbed in the very act of winding her distant toils around us; prevented from crippling and dissevering the limbs and members of our empire; detected, in a word, and driven from the covert approaches of fraud and policy, calls in her scattered skirmishers, collects her strength, and strikes di. rectly at the heart. Such is the short but true account of these events. Our enemy has waged one continued war upon us, from the day on which he sign d the peace; and now that he is arrested in that pacific, safe, and bloodless hostility, he is constrained per force either to abandon his last and fondest hope, that which has been the motive, and, in his estimation, was to be the rich fruit of all his past, but otherwise barren, unrequited labours, the overthrow of the British empire; or to try, as the only course not yet barred against him (and I trust it will prove not only his last but his forlorn hope), to try his fortune in the only open contest he is capable of maintaining with us; a contest for the metropolis itself of our empire, for the very soil and territory of these kingdoms.We have but this question, then, to resolveshall we defend our country, or resign it?

And first, I ask, what is that country? What is this golden prize for which we are to contend? A country, rich in all the blessings that are derived from a free and equal government; a government which seems to have grown and matured itself by the continued exercise of wisdom in the lawgivers, and virtue in the people, through a long series of ages; which has been sanctioned by the applause, and even by the acknowledged envy of the whole world; but the excellence of which is yet better proved, by the unceasing progress of the people in every species of prosperity and happiness; a government which knows no distinctions amongst us in the protection of the laws; which enables every man of

every degree, alike, to acquire the fair fruits of honest industry, of useful talents, of genius, and even of fortune; and when acquired, secures alike to all, the firm possession of their own; a government which, thus perfect in theory, has been administered, through the whole at least of our generation, by the most virtuous, the most just, the most benevolent man in the nation. Such is the Sovereign whom we are summoned to renounce; such the Government which we are commanded, by an insolent stranger, to exchange for his foreign yoke.

Let me ask once again, what is that country we would defend? It is that in which we have all drawn our first breath; which has reared us kindly to strength and manhood; which has been our mother and our tender nurse; it is that in which the ashes of our fathers are deposited; it has been our cradle, and is the hallowed tomb of our ancestors. It is that in which we have contracted the most sacred engagements, the dearest relations of human life; here we have found the companions of our childhood, the friends of our youth, the gentler partners of our lives; here our memory points at every turn to some haunt of infancy, to the scene of some endearing hour, of some treasured recollection in maturer age; in fine, to some resistless motive of love and filial duty. To sum up all in one word, it is our country! our dear, our native land! That monster never breathed, so far distorted from the forms of nature, whose bosom has not acknowledged that strongest instinct, that most universal passion, that most rational and most virtuous affection of all those which God has implanted in the breasts of his creatures-the love of his country. I speak to those whose hear's are, at this moment, glowing with it, and I need not fan the holy flame.-Let us next contemplate the evils we are called upon to avert from this country which we love.--First, te utter abolition of our own free, happy, ancient, and independent domestic government, which must make room for a new foreign tyrauny, founded on the dreadful charter of conquest, maintained and administered every hour of its existence by the edge of the sword.No man, I presume, is ignorant that the subjection of one nation to another is the lowest and most abject state of human vassalage; and that the oppression of a foreign master, that master too a conqueror, is more dreadful, as it is more shameful, than the worst imaginable evils of domestic slavery. What must it then appear to our palates, who will have to contrast its bitter

ness with the sweets of our present happy and honourable freedom?--The first consequence of such a degradation is to break the heart, to sink the spirit of the whole nation. Every energy, whether of the physical or mental powers, every sinew of laborious industry, every spring of genius, feels the enervating influence of shame, of sorrow, and despair; every thing that is worthy, every thing that is honourable, every thing that is useful, every thing that might even console, sickens, and expires under the withering touch of power, while passive disgrace and ruin alone survive, or seem to haunt, like pale and discontented ghosts, the relics of departed happiness and glory.. --Commerce and manufacture are, of course, extinguished. For where are we to look for capital or credit without security; and where are ingenuity, invention, application, diligence, and labour to be found without reward? That commerce, and all the smiling treasures it diffused amongst us; those manufactures, and all the thriving multitudes they fed, must vanish from the land; or the fruits and profits of the little that may yet cling to its native soil must be transported to other clines; must pass to the benefit of strangers; must pamper the proud and insolent luxury of the new, but universal metropolis of the world!--Shall we hope, at least, to retain the produce of our own soil? Who shall insure, even in this, our precarious tenure? Who shail promise that these foreigners will condescend to read, or will respect our charters and our inteftments? Where, in what region that they have yet visited, has the band of rapine been stayed by wax or parchment? But grant us our barren acres, for barren they must then be; what will be the amount of their produce when not a husbandman, from one` extremity of the island to the other, shall have, I do not say a security, but an expectation, a hope, to reap what he has sown? For as to our boasted security of property, that root and foundation of prosperity, it has va nished from the land; all property, great and small, permanent and transitory, must be held at will, and at the will of those whose rapacity seems to accommodate itself to every dimension of plunder, and to devour alike the rich man's treasure and the poor man's mite. Who does not know that the extent of the tyrant's exaction has no other measure than the mere physical capacity of the slave to administer to it? Let not those who have no property hope to escape. They shall pay with their bodies; shall toil at home for some upstart com

missary, some general, or some sergeant who may play the general, and their wages shall be blows; or, instead of an equitable selection, perhaps one in a hundred, to defend, in some rare emergency, their own fireside, they shall be dragged, every man without distinction, to supply the ranks of French soldiers, now become their masters; to perish in the room of Frenchmen in the most pestilent climates of the globe, fighting the cause of their oppressors.Such

is a slight and hasty sketch of the general and public oppression of a conqueror; but bas any one imagined, can any one imagine, who has not witnessed it, the infinite, the various, the unnumbered, and innumerable ramifications, of private, of individual, of subaltern rapine and vexation, which seem to shoot from such a stem? The conquering government can spread only a sort of sweeping desolation over the land. Some few may stoop, and hope to escape. But these pages and train-bearers of oppression make cleaner work of it. These tribes of petty and subordinate extortioners, these swarms of minute locusts, penetrate like snow into the closest recess and refuge of misery; they bite close, as it were, what the broader tooth of the master was obliged to spare. But why should I dwell on such images? why should I enlarge on such topics? Is it not enough to say, that the aim professed by the enemy, is the conquest of our country, the demolition of our Sovereign's throne, the abolition of our free government, the bondage, the pillage, and even the massacre of the people? Such then are the evils against which our country calls for our protecting arms.Let us next inquire who is this conqueror? who is he who presumes to number these kingdoms already amongst his provinces? who is he who would usurp the firm and lawful throne of these realms?—He comes, in the first place, no doubt, well practised in usurpation. His usurpations are of no ordinary cast; they are double, complicated villanies. He first supported the usurpation of others, that he might next usurp on the usurper. He started the bumble and servile tool, the base, unprincipled, but cruel and unmerciful instrument of the French Committees and Directory. On these honourable functions he founded his first fortunes, and continued to exalt them, until, by the very power he had obtained in this detestable servitude, he thought himself sufficiently great to add the blood of his sanguinary friends and masters to all he had already shed in their service, and to erect his own usurpation on the fragments of theirs,

He was instrumental in deposing, in dethoning, in murdering a prince who had administered mildly and benevolently, at least in his own person, a government, which, whatever may be said of it, rested on the venerable sanction of many centuries. This he did, forsooth, for the improvement of liberty; and the first use the same man made of a power usurped on that ground from the legal sovereign of an established and constitutional government, was, to reduce the same people to the most deplorable condition of domestic slavery; I mean, to crush them under the sullen and gloomy weight of a military despotism. To other nations he uniformly promised protection and favour, respect of persons, of property, of religion, and laws; emancipation from tyranny; a new influx, or a new creation of wealth and prosperity ;- his approach was, in fine, to be an æra of some new millennium. Of most of those countries he has made desolated provinces; and in his passage through the rest his footsteps may uniformly be tracked in the blood and tears of their inhabitants.In religion, his first and only sincere profession was a heism. But he has shifted from month to month, from week to week, and still, as occasion served, from Atheist to Christian, from Christian to Mahometan, from Mahometan back to the head of the Catholic church; and, believe me, if we should ever behold this pious Porteus in these kingdoms, we shall find him a good Episcopalian, an austere Presbyterian, a zealous Lutheran, a sincere Calvinist, an inspired Methodist, a scrupulous Quaker-all and every thing, from county to county, and from parish to parish, from church to conventicle, and from conventicle to the field, in the vain hope (for vain I am sure it would prove) that some of our deluded pastors, or some deluded portion of their flocks, should admit him with a little more facility into their fold, there to profess at length bis own and his only true faith-the religion of the wolf. What shall I add? I should be loath to load even an enemy with unfounded calumny. We shall soon, perhaps, have an opportunity of measuring with him braver and more generous weapons than the tongue. Yet, in the name of truth and of outraged humanity, I must not close my feeble sketch of this prodigy of guilt, without proclaiming aloud, that this man', who would have us abandon our virtuous Sovereign and bend our knees at his own detested footstool, is he who fled from his defeated and perishing army-is he who murdered in cold blood four thousand disarmed

prisoners-is the deliberate poisoner of his own sick and wounded comrades! Let us tura quickly from this shocking, this disgusting picture, and let us contemplate more grateful objects.--Who are those whom the man I have thus described has dared to claim already for his slaves? I shall not encroach upon your indulgence, by sounding the praises of the whole British nation. It were a theme pleasing indeed, but too vast for the limits of this occasion. Let us content ourselves rather with turning our eyes still a little more homeward; and let me ask, who are those whom I have now the honour to address ?

Can we look, in the whole range of this country, upon a hill, upon a plain, upon a river, nay, upon a glen, or on a burn, in which we shall not recognize some memorial of a brave ancestry? This country, placed as it was for centuries on the very frontier of an enemy-this people, living as they did from childhood to old age constantly in the advanced posts, as it were, of one great camp-this country and this people have transmitted to us all some trophy, some monument of ancient prowess. A happy revolution in our political relations has, indeed, for a considerable period, sheathed the swords, unstrung the bows, and rusted the spears of our families. I am among the first to hail and gratulate that happy change. But is it possible that these blessings, which have added new value to the country which claims our aid, should have obliterated the race, should have changed the men who inhabit it? Are we not still the sons, and, I trust, no degenerate sons, of those fathers? Does not their blood still flow in our veins, still beat in our hearts, still warm and inflame our breasts? Am I not at this moment surrounded by many illustrious names, once worn by warriors who fought so often, and fought so bravely, in the cause of their country? And should we shrink before the invaders of their tombs? their very bones, I think, would rise to chide us!such a cause, what need of motives? are there rewards which even the brave need not blush to covet. First, the consciousness that we have done our dutythat fullest and highest recompense of human action-that purest and most perfect consolation, which takes the sting clean out of every evil.Next, the gratitude of our country and the applause of poste xity. The love of glory is the passion of the brave and generous, and is worthy of standing by the side of patriotism itself, as an honourable incentive to sourage and

-In

Yet

cestors.

exertion. These rewards will not be wanting. Those whose chance it will have been to fall bravely in this holy cause, will have paid to their posterity that debt of honour which they still owed to their anThey have worn their ancient honours on the title, perhaps, of descent alone. They will now have won with their own swords, and transmit from their own hands, fresh and blooming glory to their sons. Their ashes will be consecrated by the tears of their country, their names will be canonized by its grateful remembrance. Those who shall survive, those who shall be distinguished in the noble conflict, those who shall return victorious, must meet a reward too bright, too transporting, to be painted by me. I see them followed by the shouts and by the gaze of admiring and grateful multitudes; I see them greeted by the acclamation of neighbours; see them overwhelmed in the embraces, bathed in the proud, but fond and joyful tears of parents, of sisters, of daughters; I see them rushing, perhaps, into the open arms of still more tender welcomers; for beauty and virtuous love are assigned by Providence itself to be the meed of brave and honourable men.

with a trumpet in the corners of our streets the superior piety of Messrs. Rush, Stidder, and Feltham-or, as a puff oblique to proclaim aloud with their own mouths the modest zeal of these guinea religionists, with some view to procure fresh subscriptions, or, what is much more probable, a sly, impudent insinuation, that the ministers of the established Church either do not know, or will not do their duty--an insinuation, which the dissenting part of the society are very eager to propagate, and which the true churchmen among them are not over wise to believe or to sanction.I am as ready as any one of the society, whether he has imbibed his opinion from observation or experience, to acknowledge" the crying sins

which are laid to the nation's charge," among others" the profanation of the "Lord's day,"-I am as ready" to dread "the displeasure of the Almighty at a crisis "like the present," and not less so in times less calamitous.-I am as ready to use, and do constantly use, what by the way is very slightly hinted at in this alarming letter, "the mild endeavours of persuasion," that my parishioners "shoald keep the Sabbath"day holy," and have no reason, generally, to complain of them, and I do firmly believe, that all my brethren of Sion College, and every where else, are equally active and zealous, and successful, without sounding a pharisaical trumpet to be heard of men.And in respect to the sins of the present age crying louder, or the profanation of the Sabbath being more general, than at former periods, I am one of those who do not believe the fact; and, if it really were the case, I am one of those who think that the enforcing of the laws in their utmost rigour, with the wailings and whinings of an heraclite society, would rather tend to make those sins more general-for every man of common sense and discernment must know, that such wailings excite only pity, ridicule, or contempt, and that this is an age when men are not to be prosecuted into piety. And if whinings or force be necessary, every clergyman has possession of the ears of his parish some hours in every week, uncontroled and unanswered; he has Burn in his study, and generally speaking, as tractable and good church-wardens as Messrs. Stidder and Feltham can be for the life of them, and magistrates at hand of integrity and courage to put the laws in execution, without the co-operation of any self-elected supererogating censores morum, whether clerical or laical, to assume the sworn and bounden duty of the parish priest, and to pold of lash the vices out of their parishion

ers. ——————— -Allow me, Sir, a word or two about "the extent of the exertions of this society

having been attended with considerable "effect."--Of the whole extent, indeed, I am no judge, but as far as I do know, this "considerable effect" they talk of should be read "considerable mischief."——You must have known that this society has pro secuted certain persons for selling obscene books and prints; every good man laments there are persons base enough to vend them at all, especially among boarding-school boys and girls; he will readily acknowledge such persons deserve heavy punishment; he will rejoice at their receiving it.-But, Sir, their crime from its nature sought secrecy, and would to God their punishment had done so; but that would not have suited the views, the interest, and the pride of this society; the newspapers were instructed to give publicity to the prosecution; they detailed circumstance by circumstance; they took care to inform both boys and girls that such publications were to be had, and when by negative descriptions they inflamed the curiosity and the natural warmth of youth, they most artlessly described the name of the vender, the street he lived in, and the very number of his house, which of course multiplied and expedited the sale -This, Sir, was the "considerable effect," which I know the society has produced in many lamentable instances by the publicity of their exertions, and this is the only effect it could produce; the prosecution would have been as severe and as exemplary without it; the offender would have been as effectually, nay more effectually, stopped in his career, and there would have been much greater hope of his being reformed by the punishment.--Among all the quackeries in this age of empiricism, whether public or private, religious or moral, political or charitable, there are none so dangerous as the quackery of reformation; for my own part, whatever these gentlemen may do, I can see neither pleasure nor advantage in dabbling and raking like dirty children into the slimej and filth, and mud of the gully-hole, which can be attended with but one consequence, that of polluting the stream into which it empties itself.But this is the age of clubs, and as far as man is a gregarious animal, there can be no objection to his innocent enjoyment of social whims and pleasures;-but I hate as hypocritical, I detest as abomina ble, I dread as dangerous, all reforming socities, from the whig-club to the vice-club; because our constitution does not want mending by the factious; because our church has sufficient purity and sufficient power to