We know that over-labouring a point of this kind, has the direct contrary effect from what we wish. We know that there is a legal presumption against men quando se nimis purgitant; and if a charge of ambition is not refuted by an affected humility, certainly the character of fraud and perfidy is still less to be washed away by indications of meanness. Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits of slavish and degenerate spirits: and on the theatre of the world, it is not by assuming the mask of a Davus or a Geta that an actor will obtain credit for manly simplicity and a liberal openness of proceeding. It is an erect countenance; it is a firm adherence to principle; it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honour, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.

Therefore

all these negotiations, and all the declarations with which they are preceded and followed, can only serve to raise presumptions against that good faith and public integrity, the fame of which to preserve inviolate is so much the interest and duty of every nation.

The pledge is an engagement to "all Europe." This is the more extraordinary, because it is a pledge, which no power in Europe, whom I have yet heard of, has thought proper to require at our hands. I am not in the secrets of office; and therefore I may be excused for proceeding upon probabilities and exteriour indications. I have surveyed all Europe from the east to the west, from the north to the south, in search of this call upon us to purge ourselves of "subtle duplicity and a punic style" in our proceedings. I have not heard that his excellency the Ottoman ambassador has expressed his doubts of the British sincerity in our negotiation with the most unchristian republic lately set up at our door. What sympathy, in that quarter, may have introduced a remonstrance upon the want of faith in this nation, I cannot positively say. If it exists, it is in Turkish or Arabic, and possibly is not yet translated. But none of the nations which compose the old christian world have I yet heard as calling upon us for those judicial purgations and ordeals, by fire and water, which we have chosen to go through; for the other great proof, by battle, we seem to decline.

For whose use, entertainment, or instruction, are all those overstrained and over-laboured proceedings in council, in negotiation, and in speeches in parliament, intended? What royal cabinet is to be enriched with these highfinished pictures of the arrogance of the sworn

enemies of kings, and the meek patience of a British administration? In what heart is it intended to kindle pity towards our multiplied mortifications and disgraces? At best it is superfluous. What nation is unacquainted with the haughty disposition of the common enemy of all nations? It has been more than seen, it has been felt; not only by those who have been the victims of their imperious rapa city, but, in a degree, by those very powers who have consented to establish this robbery, that they might be able to copy it, with the impunity to make new usurpations of their own. The king of Prussia has hypothecated in trust to the regicides his rich and fertile territories on the Rhine, as a pledge of his zeal of affection to the cause of liberty and equality. He has seen them robbed with unbounded liberty, and with the most levelling equality. The woods are wasted; the country is ravaged; property is confiscated; and the people are put to bear a double yoke, in the exactions of a tyrannical government and in the contributions of an hostile irruption. Is it to satisfy the court of Berlin, that the court of London is to give the same sort of pledge of its sincerity and good faith to the French directory? It is not that heart full of sensibility,-it is not Lucchesini, the minister of his Prussian Majesty, the late ally of England, and the present ally of its enemy, who has demanded this pledge of our sincerity, as the price of renewal of the long lease of his sincere friendship to this kingdom.

It is not to our enemy, the now faithful ally of regicide, late the faithful ally of Great Britian, the Catholic king, that we address our doleful lamentation: it is not to the Prince of Peace, whose declaration of war was one of the first auspicious omens of general tranquillity, which our dove-like ambassador, with the olive branch in his beak, was saluted with at his entrance into the ark of clean birds at Paris.

Surely is not to the Tetrarch of Sardinia, now the faithful ally of a power who has seized upon all his fortresses, and confiscated the oldest dominions of his house; it is not to this once powerful, once respected, and once cherished ally of Great Britain, that we mean to prove the sincerity of the peace which we offered to make at his expense. Or is it we are to prove the arrogance of the power who, under the name of friend, oppresses him, and the poor remains of his subjects, with all the ferocity of the most cruel enemy?

him

It is not to Holland, under the name of an ally, laid under a permanent military contribution, filled with their double garrison of barba

rous jacobin troops, and ten times more barbarous jacobin clubs and assemblies, that we find ourselves obliged to give this pledge.

Is it to Genoa, that we make this kind promise; a state which the regicides were to defend in a favourable neutrality, but whose neutrality has been, by the gentle influence of jacobin authority, forced into the trammels of an alliance; whose alliance has been secured by the admission of French garrisons; and whose peace has been for ever ratified by a forced declaration of war against ourselves?

It is not the grand duke of Tuscany who claims this declaration; not the grand duke, who for his early sincerity, for his love of peace, and for his entire confidence in the amity of the assassins of his house, has been complimented in the British parliament with the name of "the wisest sovereign in Europe:"-It is not this pacific Solomon, or his philosophic cudgelled ministry, cudgelled by English and by French, whose wisdom and philosophy between them, have placed Leghorn in the hands of the enemy of the Austrian family, and driven the only profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port. It is not this sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose chair he sits: it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative than Gallileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the republic, always the same, always one and indivisible.

It is not Venice, whose principal cities the enemy has appropriated to himself, and scornfully desired the state to indemnify itself from the emperour, that we wish to convince of the pride and the despotism of an enemy, who loads us with his scoffs and buffets.

It is not for his holiness we intend this consolatory declaration of our own weakness, and of the tyrannous temper of his grand enemy. That prince has known both the one and the other from the beginning. The artists of the French revolution, had given their very first essays and sketches of robbery and desolation against his territories, in a far more cruel "murdering piece" than had ever entered into the imagination of painter or poet. Without ceremony they tore from his cherishing arms, the possessions which he held for five hundred years, undisturbed by all the ambition of all the ambitious monarchs who, during that period, have reigned in France. Is it to him, in whose wrong we have in our late negotiation coded his now unhappy countries near the Rhone, Intely among the most flourishing (perhaps the

most flourishing for their extent) of all the countries upon earth, that we are to prove the sincerity of our resolution to make peace with the republic of barbarism? That venerable poten tate and pontiff, is sunk deep into the vale of years; he is half disarmed by his peaceful character; his dominions are more than half disarmed by a peace of two hundred years, defended as they were, not by force but by reverence; yet in all these straits, we see him display, amid the recent ruins and the new defacements of his plundered capital, along with the mild and decorated piety of the modern, all the spirit and magnanimity of ancient Rome? Does he, who, though himself unable to defend them, nobly refused to receive pecuniary compensations for the protection he owed to his people of Avignon, Carpentras, and the Venaisin;-does he want proofs of our good disposition to deliver over that people, without and security for them, or any compensation to their sovereign, to this cruel enemy? Does he want to be satisfied of the sincerity of our humiliation to France, who has seen his free, fertile and happy city and state of Bologna, the cradle of regenerated law, the seat of sciences and of arts, so hideously metamorphosed, while he was crying to Great Britain for aid. and offering to purchase that aid at any price? Is it him, who sees that chosen spot of plenty and delight converted into a jacobin ferocious republic, dependent on the homicides of France? Is it him, who, from the miracles of his beneficent industry, has done a work which defied the power of the Roman emperours, though with an enthralled world to labour for them; is it him, who has drained and cultivated the Pontine Marshes, that we are to satisfy out cordial spirit of conciliation, with those who, in their equity, are restoring Holland again to the seas, whose maxims poison more than the exhalations of the most deadly fens, and who turn all the fertilities of nature and of art into an howling desert? Is it to him, that we are to demonstrate the good faith of our submissions to the cannibal republic; to him who is commanded to deliver into their hands Ancona and Civita Vecchia, seats of commerce, raised by the wise and liberal labours and expenses of the present and late pontiffs; ports not more belonging to the Ecclesiastical state than to the commerce of Great Britain: thus wresting from his hands the power of the keys of the centre of Italy, as before they had taken possession of the northern part, from the hands of the unhappy king of Sardinia, the natural ally of England? Is it to him we are to prove our good faith in the peace which we are soliciting

to receive from the hands of his and our robbers, the enemies of al arts, all sciences, all civilization, and all commerce?

Is it to the Cispadane or to the Transpadane republics, which have been forced to bow under the galling yoke of French liberty, that we address all these pledges of our sincerity and love of peace with their unnatural parents?

Are we by this declaration to satisfy the king of Naples to struggle as he can, after our abdication of Corsica, and the flight of the whole naval force of England out of the whole circuit of the Mediterranean, abandoning our allies, our commerce, and the honour of a nation, once the protectress of all other nations, because strengthened by the independence, and enriched by the commerce of them all? By the express provisions of a recent treaty, we had engaged with the king of Naples to keep a naval force in the Mediterranean. But, good God! was a treaty at all necessary for this? The uniform policy of this kingdom as a state, and eminently so, as a commercial state, has at all times led us to keep a powerful squadron and a commodious naval station in that central sea, which borders upon, and which connects, a far greater number and variety of states, European, Asiatic, and African, than any other. Without such a naval force France must become despotic mistress of that sea, and of all the countries whose shores it washes. Our commerce must become vassal on her and dependent on her will. Since we are come no longer to trust to our force in arms, but to our dexterity in negotiation, and begin to pay a desperate court to a proud and coy usurpation, and have finally sent an ambassador to the Bourbon regicides at Paris; the king of Naples, who saw, that no reliance was to be placed on our engagements, or on any pledge of our adherence to our nearest and dearest interests, has been obliged to send his ambassador also to join the rest of the squalid tribe of the representatives of degraded kings. This monarch, surely, does not want any proof of the sincerity of our amicable dispositions to that amicable republic, into whose arms he has been given by our desertion of him.

To look to the powers of the north, it is not to the Danish ambassador, insolently treated, in his own character and in ours, that we are to give proofs of the regicide arrogance, and of our disposition to submit to it.

With regard to Sweden, I cannot say much. The French influence is struggling with her independence; and they who consider the manner in which the ambassador of that power was treated not long since at Paris, and the VOL. II.-18

manner in which the father of the present king of Sweden (himself the victim of regicide principles and passions) would have looked on the present assassins of France, will not be very prompt to believe that the young king of Sweden had made this kind of requisition to the king of Great Britain, and has given this kind of auspice of his new government.

I speak last of the most important of all. It certainly was not the last empress of Russia at whose instance we have given this pledge. It is not the new emperour, the inheritor of so much glory, and placed in a situ ation of so much delicacy and difficulty for the preservation of that inheritance, who calls on England, the natural ally of his dominions, to deprive herself of her power of action, and to bind herself to France. France at no time, and in none of its fashions, least of all in its last, has been ever looked upon as the friend either of Russia or of Great Britain. Every thing good, I trust, is to be expected from this prince; whatever may be without authority, given out of an influence over his mind possessed by that only potentate, from whom he has any thing to apprehend, or with whom he has much even to discuss.

This sovereign knows, I have no doubt, and feels, on what sort of bottom is to be laid the foundation of a Russian throne. He knows what a rock of native granite is to form the pedestal of his statue, who is to emulate Peter the great. His renown will be in continuing with ease and safety, what his predecessor was obliged to achieve through mighty struggles. He is sensible that his business is not to innovate, but to secure and to establish; that reformations at this day are attempts at best of ambiguous utility. He will revere his father with the piety of a son; but in his government he will imitate the policy of his mother. His father, with many excellent qualities, had a short reign; because, being a native Russian, he was unfortunately advised to act in the spirit of a foreigner. His mother reigned over Russia three and thirty years with the greatest glory; because with the disadvantage of being a foreigner born, she made herself a Russian. A wise prince like the present will improve his country; but it will be cautiously and progressively, upon its own native groundwork of religion, manners, habitudes, and alliances. If I prognosticate right, it is not the emperour of Russia that ever will call for extravagant proofs of our desire to reconcile ourselves to the irreconcilable enemy of all thrones.

I do not know why I should rot include