commercial, have been at all times the most heavily taxed: or so void of common sense as not to see that there is no analogy in the case of a tradesman and his creditors, to a nation indebted to itself. Surely, a much fairer instance would be that of a husband and wife playing cards at the same table against each other, where what the one loses the other gains. Taxes may be indeed, and often are, injurious to a country: at no time, however, from their amount merely, but from the time or injudicious mode in which they are raised. A great statesman, lately deceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some proposed impost, said,—' the nation has been already bled in every vein, and is faint with loss of blood.' This blood, however, was circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the system at large.

But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters from the surface of the planet. The sun may draw up the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back in genial showers to the garden, the pasture, and the corn-field; but it may likewise force away the moisture from the fields of tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or the unprofitable sand-waste. The gardens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital through the whole population, by the joint effect of taxation and trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the government may be fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, carrying on in different places, by means of its partners and over

seers, the trades of the ship-builder, the clothier, the iron-founder, and the like.

There are so many real evils, so many just causes of complaint in the constitution and administration of governments, our own not excepted, that it becomes the imperious duty of every wellwisher of his country, to prevent, as much as in him lies, the feelings and efforts of his compatriots from losing themselves on a wrong scent. Whether a system of taxation is injurious or beneficial on the whole, is to be known, not by the amount of the sum taken from each individual, but by that which remains behind. A war will doubtless cause a stagnation of certain branches of trade, and severe temporary distress in the places where those branches are carried on; but are not the same effects produced in time of peace by prohibitory edicts and commercial regulations of foreign powers, or by new rivals with superior advantages in other countries, or in different parts of the same? Bristol has, doubtless, been injured by the rapid prosperity of Liverpool and its superior spirit of enterprise; and the vast machines of Lancashire have overwhelmed and rendered hopeless the domestic industry of females in the cottages and small farm-houses of Westmoreland and Cumberland. But if peace has its stagnation as well as war, does not war create or re-enliven numerous branches of industry as well as peace? Is it not a fact, that not only our own military and naval forces, but even a part of those of our enemy are armed and clothed by British manufacturers? It can not be doubted, that the whole of our immense military force is better and more expensively clothed, and both these and our sailors better fed than the same persons would be in their individual capacities and this forms one of the real expenses of war. Not, I say, that so much more money is raised, but that so much more of the means of comfortable existence are consumed, than would otherwise have been. But does not this, like all other luxury, act as a stimulus on the producing classes, and this in the most useful manner, and on the most important branches of production, on the tiller, on the grazier, the clothier and the maker of arms? Had it been otherwise, is it possible that the receipts from the property tax should have increased, instead of decreased, notwithstanding all the rage of our enemy?

Surely, never from the beginning of the world was such a trib

ute of admiration paid by one power to another, as Buonaparte within the last few years has paid to the British empire. With all the natural and artificial powers of almost the whole of continental Europe, with all the fences and obstacles of all public and private morality broken down before him, with a mighty empire of fifty millions of men, nearly two thirds of whom speak the same language, and are as it were fused together by the intensest nationality; with this mighty and swarming empire, organized in all its parts of war, and forming one huge camp, and himself combining in his own person the two-fold power of monarch and commander-in-chief;—with all these advantages, with all these stupendous instruments and inexhaustible resources of offence, this mighty being finds himself imprisoned by the enemy whom he most hates, and would fain despise, insulted by every wave that breaks upon his shores, and condemned to behold his vast flotillas as worthless and idle as the sea-weed that rots around their keels! After years of haughty menace and expensive preparations for the invasion of an island, the trees and buildings of which are visible from the roofs of his naval store-houses, he is at length compelled to make open confession, that he possesses one mean only of ruining Great Britain. And what is it? The ruin of his own enslaved subjects. To undermine the resources of one enemy, he reduces the continent of Europe to the wretched state in which it was before the wide diffusions of trade and commerce, deprives its inhabitants of comforts and advantages to which they and their fathers had been for more than a century habituated, and thus destroys, as far as his power extends, a principal source of civilization, the origin of a middle class throughout Christendom, and with it the true balance of society, the parent of international law, the foster-nurse of general humanity, and, to sum up all in one, the main principle of attraction and repulsion, by which the nations were rapidly, though insensibly, drawn together into one system, and by which alone they could combine the manifold blessings of distinct character and national independence, with the needful stimulation and general influences of intercommunity, and be virtually united, without being crushed together by conquest, in order to waste away under the tabes and slow putrefaction of a universal monarchy. This boasted pacificator of the world, this earthly

Providence, as his Roman Catholic bishops blasphemously call him, professes to entertain no hope of purchasing the destruction of Great Britain at a less price than that of the barbarism of all Europe. By the ordinary war of government against government, fleets against fleets, and armies against armies, he could effect nothing. His fleets might as well have been built at his own expense in our dockyards, as tribute offerings to the masters of the ocean whilst his army of England lay encamped on his coasts like wolves baying the moon!

Delightful to humane and contemplative minds was the idea of countless individual efforts working together by a common instinct and to a common object, under the protection of an unwritten code of religion, philosophy, and common interest, which made peace and brotherhood co-exist with the most active hostility. Not in the untamed plains of Tartary, but in the very bosom of civilization, and himself indebted to its fostering care for his own education and for all the means of his elevation and power, did this genuine offspring of the old serpent warm himself into the fiend-like resolve of waging war against mankind and the quiet growth of the world's improvement-in an emphatic sense the enemy of the human race. By these means only he deems Great Britain assailable,-a strong presumption, that our prosperity is built on the common interest of mankind ;-this he acknowledges to be his only hope-and in this hope he has been utterly baffled.

To what then do we owe our strength and our immunity? To the sovereignty of law,-the incorruptness of its administration,our national church, our religious sects,-the purity, or at least the decorum, of private morals, and the independence, activity, and weight, of public opinion?-These and similar advantages are doubtless the materials of the fortress, but what has been the cement? What has bound them together? What has rendered Great Britain, from the Orkneys to the rocks of Scilly, indeed and with more than metaphorical propriety, a body politic,-our

* It has been well remarked, that there is something far more shocking in Buonaparte's pretensions to the gracious attributes of the Supreme Ruler, than in his most remorseless cruelties. There is a sort of wild grandeur, not ungratifying to the imagination, in the answer of Timur Khan to one who remonstrated with him on the inhumanity of his devastations: cur me hominem putas, et non potius iram Dei in terris agentem ob perniciem humani generis? Why do you deem me a man, and not rather the incarnate wrath of God acting on the earth for the ruin of mankind?

roads, rivers, and canals being so truly the veins, arteries, and nerves, of the state, that every pulse in the metropolis produces a correspondent pulsation in the remotest village on its extreme shores ? What made the stoppage of the national bank the conversation of a day without causing one irregular throb, or the stagnation of the commercial current, in the minutest vessel? I answer without hesitation, that the cause and mother principle of this unexampled confidence, of this system of credit, which is as much stronger than mere positive possessions, as the soul of man is than his body, or as the force of a mighty mass in free motion, than the pressure of its separate component parts in a state of rest—the main cause of this, I say, has been our national debt. What its injurious effects on the literature, the morals, and religious principles of this country, have been, I shall hereafter develop with the same boldness. But as to our political strength and circumstantial prosperity, it is the national debt which has wedded in indissoluble union all the interests of the state, the landed with the commercial, and the man of independent fortune with the stirring tradesman and reposing annuitant. It is the national debt, which, by the rapid nominal rise in the value of things, has made it impossible for any considerable number of men to retain their own former comforts without joining in the common industry, and adding to the stock of national produce; which thus first necessitates a general activity and then by the immediate and ample credit, which is never wanting to him, who has any object on which his activity can employ itself, gives each man the means not only of preserving but of increasing and multiplying all his former enjoyments, and all the symbols of the rank in which he was born. It is this which has planted the naked hills and inclosed the bleak wastes in the lowlands of Scotland not less than in the wealthier districts of South Britain it is this, which, leaving all the other causes of patriotism and national fervor undiminished and uninjured, has added to our public duties the same feeling of necessity, the same sense of immediate self-interest, which in other countries actuates the members of a single family in their conduct toward each other.

Somewhat more than a year ago, I happened to be on a visit with a friend, in a small market-town* in the south-west of England, when one of the company turned the conversation to the

* Nether Stowey.-Ed.