liberty only. Our love of liberty and our love of our country were not distinct things. Liberty is now, it seems, put upon a larger and more liberal bottom. We are men, and as men, undoubtedly, nothing human is foreign to us. We cannot be too liberal in our general wishes for the happiness of our kind. But in all questions on the mode of procuring it for any particular community, we ought to be fearful of admitting those, who have no interest in it, or who have, perhaps, an interest against it, into the consultation. Above all, we cannot be too cautious in our communication with those, who seek their happiness by other roads than those of humanity, morals, and religion, and whose liberty consists, and consists alone, in being free from those restraints, which are imposed by the virtues upon the passions. When we invite danger from a confidence in defensive measures, we ought, first of all, to be sure, that it is a species of danger, against which any defensive measures, that can be adopted, will be sufficient. Next we ought to know, that the spirit of our laws, or that our own dispositions, which are stronger than laws, are susceptible of all those defensive measures, which the occasion may require. A third consideration is, whether these measures will not bring more odium than strength to government; and the last, whether the authority, that makes them, in a general corruption of manners and principles, can ensure their execution? Let no one argue from the state of things, as he sees them at present, concerning what will be the means and capacities of government, when the time arrives, which shall call for remedies commensurate to enormous evils. It is an obvious truth, that no constitution can defend itself: it must be defended by the wisdom and fortitude of men. These are what no constitution can give they are the gifts of God; and he alone knows, whether we shall possess such gifts at the time when we stand in need of them. Constitutions furnish the civil means of getting at the natural; it is all, that in this case they can do. But our constitution has more impediments than helps. Its excellencies, when they come to be put to this sort of proof, may be found among its defects. Nothing looks more awful and imposing than an ancient fortification. Its lofty embattled walls, its bold, projecting, rounded towers, that pierce the sky, strike the imagination, and promise inexpugnable strength. But they are the very things that make its weakness. You may as well think of opposing one of these old fortresses to the mass of artillery brought by a French irruption into the field, as to think of resisting, by your old laws, and your old forms, the new destruction, which the corps of jacobin engineers of to-day prepare for all such forms and all such laws. Besides the debility and false principle of their construction to resist the present modes of attack, the fortress itself is in ruinous repair, and there is a practicable breach in every part of it. "In the costume assumed by the members of the legislative "body, we almost behold the revival of the extinguished insignia Such is the work. But miserable works have been defended by the constancy of the garrison. Weather-beaten ships have been brought safe to port by the spirit and alertness of the crew. But it is here that we shall eminently fail. The day, that, by their consent, the seat of regicide has its place among the thrones of Europe, there is no longer a motive for zeal in their favour; it will at best be cold, unimpassioned, dejected, melancholy duty. The glory will seem all on the other side. The friends of the Crown will appear not as champions, but as victims; discountenanced, mortified, lowered, defeated, they will fall into listlessness and indifference. They will leave things to take their course; enjoy the present hour, and submit to the common fate. Is it only an oppressive night-mare, with which we have been loaded? Is it then all a frightful dream, and are there no regicides in the.world? Have we not heard of that prodigy of a ruffian, who would not suffer his benignant sovereign, with his hands tied behind him, and stripped for execution, to say one parting word to his deluded people;-of Santerre, who commanded the drums and trumpets to strike up to stifle his voice, and dragged him backward to the machine of murder? This nefarious villain (for a few days I may call him so) stands high in France, as in a republick of robbers and murderers he ought. What hinders this monster from being sent as ambassadour to convey to his Majesty the first compliments of his brethren, the regicide directory? They have none that can represent them more properly. I anticipate the day of his arrival. He will make his publick entry into London on one of the pale horses of his brewery. As he knows, that we are pleased with the Paris taste for the orders of knighthood,* he will fling a bloody sash across his shoulders with the order of the Holy Guillotine, surmounting the crown, appendant to the riband. Thus adorned, he will proceed from Whitechapel to the further end of Pall-Mall, all the musick of London playing the Marseillois hymn before him, and escorted by a chosen detachment of the Legion de l'Echafaud. It were only to be wished, that no ill-fated loyalist for the imprudence of his zeal may stand in the pillory at Charing-cross, under the statue of King Charles the First, at the time of this grand procession, lest some of the rotten eggs, which the constitutional society shall let fly at his indiscreet head, may hit the virtuous murderer of his king. They might soil the state dress, which the ministers of so many crowned heads have admired, and in which Sir Clement Cotterel is to introduce him at St. James's. If Santerre cannot be spared from the constitutional butcheries at home, Tallien may supply his place, and, in point of figure, with advantage. He has been habituated to commissions; and he is as well qualified as Santerre for this. Nero wished the Roman people had but one neck. The wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, of knighthood," &c. &c. See A View of the relative State of Great Britain and France at the commencement of the year 1796. was, that his sovereign had eighty-three heads, that | expence was spared for their equipment and decohe might send one to every one of the departments. ration. They were made an affair of state. There Tallien will make an excellent figure at Guildhall is no invention of seduction, never wholly wantat the next sheriff's feast. He may open the ball ing in that place, that has not been encreased; with my Lady Mayoress. But this will be after brothels, gaming-houses, every thing. And there he has retired from the publick table, and gone into is no doubt but, when they are settled in a trithe private room for the enjoyment of more social umphant peace, they will carry all these arts to and unreserved conversation with the ministers of their utmost perfection, and cover them with every state and the judges of the bench. There these species of imposing magnificence. They have all ministers and magistrates will hear him entertain along avowed them as a part of their policy; and the worthy aldermen with an instructing and pleas- whilst they corrupt young minds through pleasure, ing narrative of the manner in which he made the they form them to crimes. Every idea of corporich citizens of Bourdeaux squeak, and gently led ral gratification is carried to the highest excess, them by the publick credit of the guillotine to dis- and wooed with all the elegance that belongs to gorge their anti-revolutionary pelf. the senses. All elegance of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastick, windy phraseology of heroick virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners. Any one, who attends to all their own descriptions, narratives, and dissertations, will find in that whole place more of the air of a body of assassins, banditti, house-breakers, and outlawed smugglers, joined to that of a gang of strolling players, expelled from and exploded orderly theatres, with their prostitutes in a brothel, at their debauches and bacchanals, than any thing of the refined and perfected virtues, or the polished, mitigated vices of a great capital. All this will be the display, and the town-talk, when our regicide is on a visit of ceremony. At home nothing will equal the pomp and splendour of the Hotel de la Republique. There another scene of gaudy grandeur will be opened. When his Citizen Excellency keeps the festival, which every citizen is ordered to observe, for the glorious execution of Louis the Sixteenth, and renews his oath of detestation of kings, a grand ball, of course, will be given on the occasion. Then what a hurly-burly; what a crowding ;-what a glare of a thousand flambeaus in the square;—what a clamour of footmen contending at the door; what a rattling of a thousand coaches of duchesses, countesses, and Lady Marys, choking the way, and overturning each other, in a struggle, who should be first to pay her court to the Citoyenne, the spouse of the twenty-first husband, he the husband of the thirty-first wife, and to hail her in the rank of honourable matrons, before the four days duration of marriage is expired!-Morals, as they were:-decorum, the great outguard of the sex, and the proud sentiment of honour, which makes virtue more respectable where it is, and conceals human frailty where virtue may not be, will be banished from this land of propriety, modesty, and reserve. We had before an ambassadour from the Most Christian king. We shall have then one, perhaps two, as lately, from the most antichristian republick. His chapel will be great and splendid; formed on the model of the Temple of Reason at Paris, while the famous ode of the infamous Chenier will be sung, and a prostitute of the street adored as a goddess. We shall then have a French ambassadour without a suspicion of popery. One good it will have it will go some way in quieting the minds of that synod of zealous protestant lay elders, who govern Ireland on the pacifick principles of polemick theology, and who now, from dread of the pope, cannot take a cool bottle of claret, or enjoy an innocent parliamentary job, with any tolerable quiet. So far as to the French communication here :what will be the effect of our communication there? We know, that our new brethren, whilst they every where shut up the churches, encreased in Paris, at one time at least four-fold, the opera-houses, the play-houses, the publick shows of all kinds; and, even in their state of indigence and distress, no Is it for this benefit we open " the usual rela❝tions of peace and amity?" Is it for this our youth of both sexes are to form themselves by travel? Is it for this, that with expence and pains we form their lisping infant accents to the language of France? I shall be told, that this abominable medley is made rather to revolt young and ingenuous minds. So it is in the description. So perhaps it may in reality to a chosen few. So it may be, when the magistrate, the law, and the church, frown on such manners, and the wretches to whom they belong; when they are chased from the eye of day, and the society of civil life, into night-cellars, and caves, and woods. But when these men themselves are the magistrates, when all the consequence, weight, and authority, of a great nation adopt them; when we see them conjoined with victory, glory, power, and dominion, and homage paid to them by every government, it is not possible, that the downhill should not be slid into, recommended by every thing which has opposed it. Let it be remembered, that no young man can go to any part of Europe without taking this place of pestilential contagion in his way: and, whilst the less active part of the community will be debauched by this travel, whilst children are poisoned at these schools, our trade will put the finishing hand to our ruin. No factory will be settled in France, that will not become a club of complete French jacobins. The minds of young men of that description will receive a taint in their religion, their morals, and their politicks, 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 horrour is, that schools of atheism are set up at the publick 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 in-persons on their trial. Their claim to this excepfirmity 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 tion 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 restraint on mis-judgment is the censure of the publick. 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 magistrates 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 ambassadour, 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 Gallick 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 government. 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 publickly 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 sympathetick attention to their publick 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 citizensoldiers 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 necessities 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 The manuscript copy of this Letter ends here, A LETTER TO THE EMPRESS OF RUSSIA. MADAM, THE Comte de Woronzow, your Imperial Ma- | glory, has nobly and wisely disdained to associate jesty's minister, and Mr. Fawkener, have informed your Crown with a faction, which has for its obme of the very gracious manner in which your Im-ject the subversion of all thrones. perial 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 alone truly and freely be represented; that is, in its royal blood, -where alone the nation can be represented that is, in its natural and inherent dignity. A throne cannot be represented by a prison. The honour of a nation cannot be represented by an assembly, which disgraces and degrades it; at Coblentz only the king and the nation of France are to be found. Your Imperial Majesty, who reigns and lives for You have not recognized this universal publick enemy as a part of the system of Europe. You have refused to sully the lustre of your empire by any communion with a body of fanatical usurpers and tyrants, drawn out of the dregs of society, and exalted to their evil eminence by the enormity of their crimes; an assemblage of tyrants, wholly destitute of any distinguished qualification in a single person amongst them, that can command reverence from our reason, or seduce it from our prejudices. These enemies of sovereigns, if at all acknowledged, must be acknowledged on account of that enmity alone. They have nothing else to recommend them. Madam, it is dangerous to praise any human virtue before the accomplishment of the tasks, which it imposes on itself. But, in expressing my part of what, I hope, is, or will become, the general voice, in admiration of what you have done, I run no risk at all. With your Imperial Majesty, declaration and execution, beginning and conclusion, are, at their different seasons, one and the same thing. On the faith and declaration of some of the first potentates of Europe, several thousands of persons, comprehending the best men, and the best gentlemen, in France, have given up their country, their houses, their fortunes, their professional situation, their all; and are now in foreign lands, struggling under the most grievous distresses. Whatever appearances may menace, nobody fears that they can be finally abandoned. Such a dereliction could not be without a strong imputation on the publick and private honour of sovereignty itself, nor without an irreparable injury to its interests. It would give occasion to represent monarchs as natural enemies to each other; and that they never support or countenance any subjects of a brother prince, except when they rebel against him. We individuals, mere spectators of the scene, but who seek our liberties under the shade of legal authority, and of course sympathize with the sufferers in that cause, never can permit ourselves to believe, that such an event can disgrace the history of our time. The only thing to be feared is delay; in which are included many mischiefs. The constancy of the oppressed will be broken; the power of tyrants will be confirmed. Already the multitude of French officers, drawn |