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particulars of the infamous sale of some thousands of his subjects as soldiers." On the same day I discovered in the landlord of a small public-house one of the men who had been thus sold. He seemed highly delighted in entertaining an English gentleman, and in once more talking English after a lapse of so many years. He was far from regretting this incident in his life, but his account of the manner in which they were forced away acorded in so many particulars with Schiller's impassioned description of the same or a similar scene, in his tragedy of Cabal and Love, as to leave a perfect conviction on my mind, that the dramatic pathos of that description was not greater than its historic fidelity.

As I was thus reflecting, I glanced my eye on the leading paragraph of a London newspaper, containing much angry declamation, and some bitter truths, respecting our military arrangements. It were in vain, thought I, to deny that the influence of parliamentary interest, which prevents the immense patronage of the crown from becoming a despotic power, is not the most likely to secure the ablest commanders or the fittest persons for the management of our foreign empire. However, thank God' if we fight, we fight for our own king and country: and grievances which may be publicly complained of, there is some chance of seeing remedied.

III. A celebrated professor in a German university, showed me a very pleasing print, entitled, Toleration.-A Roman Catholic priest, a Lutheran divine, a Calvinist minister, a Quaker, a Jew, and a philosopher, were represented sitting round the same table, over which a winged figure hovered in the attitude of protection "For this harmless print," said my friend, “the artist was imprisoned, and having attempted to escape, was sentenced to draw the boats on the banks of the Danube, with robbers and murderers and there died in less than two months, from exhaustion and exposure. In your happy country, sir, this print would be considered as a pleasing scene from real life: for in every great town throughout your empire you may meet with the original." "Yes," I replied, as far as the negative ends of government are concerned, we have no reason to complain. Our government protects us from foreign enemies, and our laws secure our lives, our personal freedom, our property, reputation, and religious rights, from domestic attacks. Our taxes, indeed, are enormous"

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"Oh! talk not of taxes," said my friend, "till you have resided in a country where the boor disposes of his produce to strangers for a foreign mart, not to bring back to his family the comforts and conveniences of foreign manufactures, but to procure that coin which his lord is to squander away in a distant land. Neither can I with patience hear it said, that your laws act only to the negative ends of government. They have a manifold positive influence, and their incorrupt administration gives a color to all your modes of thinking, and is one of the chief causes of your superior morality in private as well as public life."*

My limits compel me to strike out the different incidents which I had written as a commentary on the former three of the positive ends of government. To the moral feelings of my readers they might have been serviceable; but for their understandings they are superfluous. It is surely impossible to peruse those ends, and not admit that all three are realized under our government to a degree unexampled in any other old and long peopled country. The defects of our constitution, in which word I include the laws and customs of the land as well as its scheme of legislative and executive power, must exist, therefore, in the fourth, namely, the production of the highest average of general information, of general moral and religious principles, and the excitements and opportunities which it affords to paramount genius and heroic power in a sufficient number of its citizens. These are points in which it would be immorality to rest content with the presumption, however well founded, that we are better

* “The administration of justice throughout the continent is partial, venal, and infamous. I have, in conversation with many sensible men, met with something of content with their governments in all other respects than this; but upon the question of expecting justice to be really and fairly administered, every one confessed there was no such thing to be looked for. The conduct of the judges is profligate and atrocious. Upon almost every cause that comes before them interest is openly made with the judges; and woe betide the man, who, with a cause to support has no means of conciliating favor, either by the beauty of a handsome wife, or by other methods."This quotation is confined in the original to France under the monarchy; I have extended the application, and adopted the words as comprising the result of my own experience: and I take this opportunity of declaring, that the most important part of Mr. Leckie's statement concerning Sicily, I myself know to be accurate, and am authorized by what I myself saw there, to rely on the whole as a fair and unexaggerated representation.

than others, if we are not what we ought to be ourselves, and are not using the means of improvement. The first question then is, What is the fact? The second upon the supposition of a defect or deficiency in one or all of these points, and that to a degree which affect our power may and prosperity, if not our absolute safety, are the plans of legislative reform that have hitherto been proposed fit or likely to remove such defect, and supply such deficiency? The third and last question is,—Should there appear reason to deny or doubt this, are there any other means, and what are they? Of these points in the concluding essay of this section.

A French gentleman in the reign of Louis XIV. was comparing the French and English writers with all the boastfulness of national prepossession. "Sir!" replied an Englishman, better versed in the principles of freedom than the canons of criticism, "there are but two subjects worthy the human intellect, politics and religion, our state here and our state hereafter; and on neither of these dare you write." Long may the envied privilege be preserved to my countrymen of writing and talking concerning both! Nevertheless, it behooves us all to consider, that to write or talk concerning any subject, without having previously taken the pains to understand it, is a breach of duty which we owe to ourselves, though it may be no offence against the laws of the land. The privilege of talking and even publishing nonsense, is necessary in a free state; but the more sparingly we make use of it the better.

ESSAY X.

Then we may thank ourselves,

Who spell-bound by the magic name of peace
Dream golden dreams. Go, warlike Briton, gc,
For the gray olive-branch change thy green laurels
Hang up thy rusty helmet, that the bee
May have a hive, or spider find a loom!
Instead of doubling drum and thrilling fife,
Be lull'd in lady's lap with amorous flutes.
But for Napoleon, know, he'll scorn this calm:
The ruddy planet at his birth bore sway;
Sanguine, adust, his humor, and wild fire
His ruling element. Rage, revenge, and cunning
Make up the temper of this captain's valor.

LITTLE prospective wisdom can that man obtain, who hurrying onward with the current, or rather torrent, of events, feels no interest in their importance, except as far as his curiosity is excited by their novelty; and to whom all reflection and retrospect are wearisome. If ever there were a time when the formation of just public principles becomes a duty of private morality; when the principles of morality in general ought to be made to bear on our public suffrages, and to affect every great national determination; when, in short, his country should have a place by every Englishman's fireside; and when the feelings and truths which give dignity to the fireside and tranquillity to the death-bed, ought to be present and influential in the cabinet and in the senate that time is now with us. As an introduction to, and at the same time as a commentary on, the subject of international law, I have taken a review of the circumstances that led to the treaty of Amiens, and the recommencement of the war, more especially with regard to the occupation of Malta.

In a rich commercial state, a war seldom fails to become unpopular by length of continuance. The first, or revolution war, which towards its close, had become just and necessary, perhaps

beyond any former example, had yet causes of unpopularity peculiar to itself. Exhaustion is the natural consequence of excessive stimulation, in the feelings of nations equally as in those of individuals. Wearied out by overwhelming novelties; stunned, as it were, by a series of strange explosions; sick too of hope long delayed; and uncertain as to the real object and motive of the war, from the rapid change and general failure of its ostensible objects and motives: the public mind for many months preceding the signing of the preliminaries had lost all its tone and elasticity. The consciousness of mutual errors and mutual disappointments disposed the great majority of all parties to a spirit of diffidence and toleration, which, amiable as it may be in individuals, in a nation, and above all in an opulent and luxurious nation, is always too nearly akin to apathy and selfish indulgence. An unmanly impatience for peace became only not universal. After as long a resistance as the nature of our constitution and national character permitted, or even endured, the government applied at length the only remedy adequate to the greatness of the evil, a remedy which the magnitude of the evil justified, and which nothing but an evil of that magnitude could justify. At a high price they purchased for us the name of peace at a time when the views of France became daily more and more incompatible with our vital interests. Considering the peace as a mere truce of experiment, wise and temperate men regarded with complacency the treaty of Amiens, for the very reasons that would have insured the condemnation of any other treaty under any other circumstances. Its palpable deficiencies were its antidote; or rather they formed its very essence, and declared at first sight, what alone it was, or was meant to be. Any attempt at that time, and in this treaty, to have secured Italy, Holland, and the German empire, would have been, in the literal sense of the word, preposterous. The nation would have withdrawn all faith in the pacific intentions of the ministers, if the negotiation had been broken off on a plea of this kind for it had taken for granted the extreme desirableness, nay, the necessity of a peace, and, this once admitted, there would, no doubt, have been an absurdity in continuing the war for objects which the war furnished no means of realizing. If the First Consul had entered into stipulations with us respecting the continent, they would have been observed only as long as his interest from other causes

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