which they will in a short time communicate to the whole kingdom.

Whilst every thing prepares the body to debauch, and the mind to crime, a regular church of avowed atheism, established by law, with a direct and sanguinary persecution of christianity, is formed to prevent all amendment and remorse. Conscience is formally deposed from its dominion over the mind. What fills the measure of horror is, that schools of atheism are set up at the public charge in every part of the country. That some English parents will be wicked enough to send their children to such schools there is no doubt. Better this island should be sunk to the bottom of the sea, than that (so far as human infirmity admits) it should not be a country of religion and morals.

With all these causes of corruption, we may well judge what the general fashion of mind will be through both sexes and all conditions. Such spectacles, and such examples, will overbear all the laws that ever blackened the cumbrous volumes of our statutes. When royalty shall have disavowed itself; when it shall have relaxed all the principles of its own support; when it has rendered the system of regicide fashionable, and received it as triumphant in the very persons who have consolidated that system by the perpetration of every crime, who have not only massacred the prince, but the very laws. and magistrates which were the support of royalty, and slaughtered with an indiscriminate proscription, without regard to either sex or age, every person that was suspected of an inclination to king, law, or magistracy-I say, will any one dare to be loyal? Will any one presume, against both authority and opinion, to hold up this unfashionable, antiquated, exploded constitution?

The jacobin faction in England must grow in strength and audacity; it will be supported by other intrigues, and supplied by other resources than yet we have seen in action. Confounded at its growth, the government may fly to parliament for its support. But who will answer for the temper of a house of commons elected under these circumstances? Who will answer for the courage of a house of commons to arm the crown with the extraordinary powers that it may demand? But the ministers will not venture to ask half of what they know they want. They will lose half of that half in the contest: and when they have obtained their nothing, they will be driven by the cries of faction either to demolish the feeble works they have thrown up in a hurry; or, in effect, to abandon them. As to the house of lords, it is not worth mentioning. The peers

ought naturally to be the pillars of the crown: but when their titles are rendered contemptible and their property invidious, and a part of their weakness and not of their strength, they will be found so many degraded and trembling individuals, who will seek by evasion to put off the evil day of their ruin. Both houses will be in perpetual oscillation between abortive attempts at energy, and still more unsuccessful attempts at compromise. You will be impatient of your disease, and abhorrent of your remedy. A spirit of subterfuge and a tone of apology will enter into all your proceedings, whether of law or legislation. Your judges who now sustain so masculine an authority, will appear more on their trial, than the culprits they have before them. The awful frown of criminal justice will be smoothed into the silly smile of seduction. Judges will think to insinuate and sooth the accused into conviction and condemnation, and to wheedle to the gallows the most artful of all delinquents. But they will not be so wheedled. They will not submit even to the appearance of persons on their trial. Their claim to this exemption will be admitted. The place in which some of the greatest names which ever distinguished the history of this country have stood, will appear beneath their dignity. The criminal will climb. from the dock to the side-bar, and take his place and his tea with the counsel. From the bar of the counsel, by a natural progress, he will ascend to the bench which long before had been virtually abandoned. They, who escape from justice, will not suffer a question upon reputation. They will take the crown of the causeway: they will be revered as martyrs; they will triumph as conquerors. Nobody will dare to censure that popular part of the tribunal, whose only restrainst on mis-judgment is the censure of the public. They, who find fault with the decision, will be represented as enemies to the institution. Juries, that convict for the crown, will be loaded with obloquy. The juries, who acquit, will be held up as models of justice. If parliament orders a prosecution and fails, (as fail it will,) it will be treated to its face as guilty of a conspiracy maliciously to prosecute. Its care in discovering a conspiracy against the state will be treated as a forged plot to destroy the liberty of the subject; every such discovery, instead of strengthening government, will weaken its reputation.

In this state, things will be suffered to proceed, lest measures of vigour should precipitate a crisis. The timid will act thus from character; the wise from necessity. Our laws had done all that the old condition of things dictated to render our judges erect and independent; but they will naturally fail on the side upon which they had taken no precautions. The judicial ma

gistrates will find themselves safe as against the crown, whose will is not their tenure; the power of executing their office will be held at the pleasure of those who deal out fame, or abuse, as they think fit. They will begin rather to consult their own repose and their own popularity, than the critical and perilous trust that is in their hands. They will speculate on consequences, when they see at court an ambassador whose robes are lined with a scarlet dyed in the blood of judges. It is no wonder, nor are they to blame, when they are to consider how they shall answer for their conduct to the criminal of to-day turned into the magistrate of to-morrow.

The press

The army

When thus the helm of justice is abandoned, an universal abandonment of all other posts will succeed. Government will be for a while the sport of contending factions, who, whilst they fight with one another, will all strike at her. She will be buffeted and beat forward and backward by the conflict of those billows; until at length, tumbling from the Gallic coast, the victorious tenth wave shall ride, like the bore, over all the rest, and poop the shattered, weather-beaten, leaky, water-logged vessel, and sink her to the bottom of the abyss.

Among other miserable remedies that have been found in the materia medica of the old college, a change of ministry will be proposed; and probably will take place. They who go out can never long with zeal and good will support government in the hands of those they hate. In a situation of fatal dependence on popularity, and without one aid from the little remaining power of the crown, it is not to be expected that they will take on them that odium which more or less attaches upon every exertion of strong power. The ministers of popularity will lose all their credit at a stroke, if they pursue any of those means necessary to give life, vigour, and consistence to govern ment. They will be considered as venal wretches, apostates, recreant to all their own principles, acts, and declarations. They cannot preserve their credit but by betraying that authority of which they are the guardians.

To be sure, no prognosticating symptoms of these things have as yet appeared. Nothing even resembling their beginnings. May they never appear! May these prognostications of the author be justly laughed at, and speedily forgotten. If nothing as yet to cause them has discovered itself, let us consider in the author's excuse, that we have not yet seen a jacobin legation in England. The natural, declared, sworn ally of sedition, has not yet fixed its head-quarters in London.

There never was a political contest, upon better or worse. grounds, that by the heat of party spirit may not ripen into civil confusion. If ever a party adverse to the crown should be in a condition here publicly to declare itself, and to divide, however unequally, the natural force of the kingdom, they are sure of an aid of fifty thousand men, at ten days warning, from the opposite coast of France. But against this infusion of a foreign force, the crown has its guarantees, old and new. But I should be glad to hear something said of the assistance which loyal subjects in France have received from other powers in support of that lawful government which secured their lawful property. I should be glad to know, if they are so disposed to a neighbourly, provident, and sympathetic attention to their public engagements, by what means they are to come at us. Is it from the powerful states of Holland we are to reclaim our guarantee? Is it from the king of Prussia and his steady good affections and his powerful navy, that we are to look for the guarantee of our security? Is it from the Netherlands, which the French may cover with the swarms of their citizen soldiers in twenty-four hours, that we are to look for this assistance? This is to suppose too that all these powers have no views offensive or necescities defensive of their own. They will cut out work for one another, and France will cut out work for them all.

That the christian religion cannot exist in this country with. such a fraternity, will not, I think, be disputed with me. On that religion, according to our mode, all our laws and institutions stand as upon their base. That scheme is supposed in every transaction of life; and if that were done away, every thing else, as in France, must be changed along with it. Thus religion perishing, and with it this constitution, it is a matter of endless meditation what order of things would follow it. But what disorder would fill the space between the present and that which is to come, in the gross, is no matter of doubtful conjecture.. It is a great evil, that of a civil war. But in that state of things, a civil war which would give to good men and a good cause some means of struggle, is a blessing of comparison that England will not enjoy. The moment the struggle begins, it ends. They talk of Mr. Hume's euthanasia of the British constitution, gently expiring without a groan, in the paternal arms of a mere monarchy.-In a monarchy !-fine trifling indeed-There is no such euthanasia for the British constitution

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The manuscript copy of this letter ends here.

A LETTER

TO

THE EMPRESS OF RUSSIA.

MADAM,

THE Comte de Woronzow, your imperial majesty's minister, and Mr. Fawkener, have informed me of the very gracious manner in which your imperial majesty, and after your example, the archduke and archduchess, have condescended to accept my humble endeavours in the service of that cause which connects the rights and duties of sovereigns with the true interest and happiness of their people.

If, confiding in titles derived from your own goodness, I venture to address, directly to your imperial majesty, the expressions of my gratitude for so distinguished an honour, I hope it will not be thought a presumptuous intrusion. I hope, too, that the willing homage I pay to the high and ruling virtues which distinguish your imperial majesty, and which form the felicity of so large a part of the world, will not be looked upon as the language of adulation to power and greatness. In my humble situation, I can behold majesty in its splendour without being dazzled, and I am capable of respecting it in its fall.

It is, madam, from my strong sense of what is due to dignity in undeserved misfortune, that I am led to felicitate your imperial majesty on the use you have lately made of your power. The princes and nobility of France, who from honour and duty, from blood and from principle, are attached to that unhappy crown, have experienced your favour and countenance: and there is no doubt, that they will finally enjoy the full benefit of your protection. The generosity of your imperial majesty has induced you to take an interest in their cause, and your sagacity has made you perceive, that in the case of the sovereign of France, the cause of all sovereigns is tried; that in the case of its church, the cause of all churches; and that in the case of its nobility is tried the cause of all the respectable orders of all society, and even of society itself.

Your imperial majesty has sent your minister to reside where the crown of France, in this disastrous eclipse of royalty, can