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 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

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 buffetted 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, waterlogged 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

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

but Mr Burche would have

the laws & institutions

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 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 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 laws and institutions stand as

our mode, all our

upon their base. That scheme is supposed in every

of Ireland transaction of life; and if that were done away,

to stand on the base of poping!

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

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.