that did not exist before, why the soldier and the general population of the country should be kept apart, or why barracks, which he had always regarded, in conformity with the opinions of the most constitutional authorities, as fortresses for controuling the kingdom, should be multiplied and enlarged? As to the policy of it, merely with regard to the soldier, he understood that when the men were on service, those who came from regular barracks, were not so healthful as others, so that even military purposes were not likely to be served by it. One of the most lavish expenses under this head was incurred by the purchase of old houses at Clifton, in a ruined state, without a window; but now we were going back to Bristol again, to guard the French prisoners. Would to God that they were all out of this country, whether we continue at war or not!" The honourable gentleman concluded, with repeating his determination to vote against the resolution.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer said, "that the honourable gentleman must be positive indeed upon the subject, and confirmed in the opinion he had formed, when he thought it right not only to censure the conduct of his majesty's government, but to vote against the resolutions before the committee."

Mr Whitbread, in explanation, stated, that his objection went only to the grant for building barracks.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer proceeded to observe," that to refuse it without knowing whether the soldiers could be otherwise accommodated, might be productive of much inconvenience. He supposed, however, that by the debating strain which the honourable gentleman had thought proper to adopt, and the topics to which he had resorted, he expected to do much towards tranquillizing the

country. When he brought forward his arguments attributing the starvation he described to the conduct of government, did he really think there was any thing in their manner of conducting the war against France which operated to produce the scarcity at Liverpool? Did he think there was any thing in it to call down the vengeance of Providence on our heads, and provoke him to deny the harvest to our hopes? If not, how could the honourable gentleman shut his eyes to what every man could see but himself, and resort to those imputations, which no man, who was acquainted with the subject, could hesitate to reject? He would own that in some inflammatory publications he had met with the topics to which the honourable gentleman had alluded; but he did not expect that any member could be found who would come down to that house for the purpose of making such statements. The honourable gentleman had spoken of golden opportunities of making peace, which ministers had ne glected; but he did not say, he could not say, whether one of those opportunities presented itself now; and if no such opportunity existed, where was the policy in asserting, that there was no salvation for the country but in peace? It would be impossible for him to say so much against the peace he recommended, as by saying that we were unable to go on with the war. The honourable gentleman had always said that he would not accept of peace but upon honourable terms. If, then, peace could not be obtained upon honourable terms, there was, according to the honourable gentleman's own feelings, and those of the country, but one alternative. Why then should the honourable gentleman give the sanc tion of his authority to the opinion, that the war could not be conducted, and that we were only to look for consolation to the event of the enemy

granting us peace? Nothing could be more improper, nothing more unjust, nothing more dangerous to the security of the country, or more calculated to inflame the minds of the people under the present high price of provisions, than flinging out opinions of this sort to the disadvantage of the great contest in which we were engaged. He would maintain, and he thought the honourable gentleman might have been included amongst the number of those who would insist upon the same doctrine, that if we could not obtain peace upon honourable terms, we must maintain the war at all hazards, and under all circumstances, and to the last extremity. As to what had been said of his intention to keep the people down by a military force, when he had driven them to madness by his policy, he would ask where was the proof? In that candour of mind, in which he hoped the honourable gentleman was not deficient, he might have acknowledged, for he must have known, that it was at least a matter of serious doubt, whether all the difficulties experienced in our trade, would not have been aggravated, if they were not met by the orders in council. In two years after the adoption of those orders, this fact was demonstrated by an increase of our trade. Yet the honourable gentleman went on with his old proof, or rather with his old statement, in defiance of this striking fact, and insisted that our sufferings were not owing to the decrees of the enemy, but to our own orders in council. If this was logic, he was sure it was not a logic which the honourable gentleman would apply to any other subject; this confusion of cause and effect, this anticipation of consequence over the means that produced it, could, in no other than a political case, have warped the mind of the honourable gentleman. But if he was right in supposing that the effects which prece

ded the decrees were not to be ascribed to them, how was it fair to represent them as the act of our own government? Was this his wisdom, was this his policy, was this his patriotism ? The reasoning of the honourable gentleman would go to turn all the resentment not against the enemy, but against the government; and that too, at a time when we were engaged in war with an enemy, who if the honourable gentleman was not aware intended our destruction, he must be ig. norant of what was known to every body else. From this country he had met with his most effectual check in the pursuit of his insatiable ambition, and in his progress to universal empire and universal tyranny, his certain disappointment. If the honourable gentleman did not see this, and he trusted in God that he did not, when he called upon the country not to look to Buonaparte and to France, but to its own government, with indignation, and ascribed the inflictions of Providence to them alone; if he did not see this, but could make such statements with a conviction that he was doing right, he was sure that such sentiments would meet with little sympathy and little support.' (Loud and continued cheers.)

Mr Whitbread rose, evidently in great agitation, and began by declaring, "that if he were not in that house, he would ask the warmest friend, or the loudest cheerer of the right hon. gentleman, whether the whole of his speech was not a gross misrepresentation? The right hon. gentleman was mistaken if he supposed that he had obtained a victory over him. No; it was a victory over his own invention. The house of commons was a fine place the constitution of England was a great thing-every thing was to be admired, respected, and supported, when an adventurer from the bar was raised by his talent for debate to a

great situation, but a great situation which nobody but himself would have accepted under such circumstances."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer here signified his dissent from the statement that nobody would have accepted the situation but himself.

Mr Whitbread repeated the statement, maintained the truth of it, and added, "If you doubt me, I refer you for information to a letter signed Spencer Perceval." (Loud cries of, order, from all parts of the house, followed this expression, and Mr Whitbread attempted for some time in vain to be heard.).

Mr Yorke rose to order. The hon. gentleman had just made one of the most outrageous personal attacks on his right hon. friend which had ever been heard in that house. With respect to the justice or propriety of the attack thus made, he

Mr Ponsonby rose to order (Here the disorder became general, and cries of Chair! Chair! resounded through the house; at length Mr Ponsonby obtained a hearing)-" I call the right hon. gentleman himself to order, and on this ground, that he having risen to call my hon. friend to order, did not confine himself to that point, but thought proper to advert to other to pics, thereby transgressing the regulations of the house. I speak this be fore high authority, who will contradict me if I should be incorrect."

Mr Lushington, the chairman, then declared his opinion to be, that Mr Whitbread had been out of order.

Mr Whitbread got up again, and "confessed he had risen in some heat, and unconsciously at the time had exceeded the limits of debate. He would however say, that if he was described as having told the people that they were to regard the government rather than Buonaparte as their enemy, it was a gross misrepresentation. Unfortunately it was too much a practice to

identify the government with the ministry, and convert the fair claims of the former to support and attachment, into a blind approbation of the measures of the latter. Whatever might be the construction put upon his words, he was determined ever to speak out in the house of commons, to conceal no part of the truth, and to lend no helping hand to the delusion, any more than to the ruin of the people. He knew nothing more likely to prove destructive to the safety and greatness of the people than the prevalence of a different doctrine. He did not confound the visitations of Providence with the decrees of France, or the measures of the right hon. gentleman. But he knew that thousands of manufacturers were now out of employment, and that tens of thousands were now working at reduced wages, which scarcely sufficed to procure them subsistence. He knew that an unreformed house of commons had approved of all the proceedings of the right honourable gentleman, and of all his orders in council, but he knew too, that the people and the merchants out of the house, were, in every part of the kingdom, of very different opinions. Was not this table already covered with petitions that daily multiplied; and had he indeed. abandoned all his patriotism when he stated this? As to what he had said with respect to peace, how was it pos sible for him to speak positively as to the fitness of the present moment; but how could any time be found appropriate unless the experiment were made? Would the right hon. gentleman, looking back to that history in which he was so well read, pronounce it to be his opinion that we were hereafter likely to obtain such desirable conditions of peace as might have been obtained at any former periods? The right hon. gentleman boasted of our being the great and only barrier to Buonaparte's desire of universal domi.

nion. On this point there could be no dispute; why were we so? Because it was the policy of the authors of this and the preceding war which had made us so; which had first made Buonaparte consul for life, and afterwards, in alliance with his own talents, had made him emperor, and had enabled him to trample upon every hostile state. The same errors and fallacies were still circulating and still believed; one day Prussia was said to be arming against France, on another she was described as uniting her force to that of France, to assist in crushing the only independ. ent state remaining on the continent. It was his duty, then, to ask the people to be misled no longer by the fatal policy of ministers; and he would ask the right hon. gentleman himself, not to become the victim of his own infatuation, by bringing the country to the end of its resources. He believed the period must soon arrive when this would be the case. He should be sorry if any thing had fallen from him that might bear an interpretation fo reign to his intentions, but he had deemed it an impressive duty to enter into this avowal of his sentiments."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer declared, "that every offensive impression which the hon. gentleman had made, more on the feelings of his hon. friends than O11 his own, was complete ly removed. He had certainly not attributed to the hon. gentleman that which he imagined him to have done. As to the question immediately before the house, he held it to be desirable that in populous towns the soldiery ought rather to be kept apart than to be quartered on the people. The hon. gentleman had again alluded to the orders in council; but could they be said to prevent the importation of corn, when it was generally known that, notwithstanding their operation, eight millions had been paid last year for foreign corn imported? The fact was,

that the scarcity was felt as severely in France at present as in England."

Mr Stephen" confessed that he did not hear the first speech of the hon. gentleman, but had the misfortune to hear the two last. He should cer tainly think himself greatly wanting in his duty to the public, if he did not endeavour to counteract, by every effort in his power, the mischievous misrepresentations of the measures of government which were circulated insidiously through the country. Those misrepresentations were calculated to divert the resources of the country from that patriotic channel in which they ought to flow, into a channel of disaffection; they were calculated to make men turn away their confidence from the conductors of our public affairs, and to make them believe that until certain measures were adopted, until a change, which he knew to be impossible, should take place, the country could never regain its former prosperity. It was the proper and peculiar duty of a member of parlia ment not to suffer the public to be de luded by artful misrepresentations, not to suffer their ignorance or their prejudices to be worked upon by those persons in the country who seemed to spend their time and talents in poisoning the minds of the people. He could conceive nothing more mischievous in a political, nor more infamous in a moral sense, than the propagation of the falsehood which was now disseminated; of falsehood he should say, be cause there were many members on the benches opposite, and even the honourable gentleman himself, (Mr Whitbread) who had admitted at various times that the effect of the orders in council was not such as was now attributed to them. He held in his hand a paper which was just one of that description which now crowded the newspapers, and in hand-bills crept through the country; this paper was

signed, "A Staffordshire Potter," and it set out with a most notorious falsehood, that before the orders in council, and under the first operation of Buonaparte's decrees, our trade was not diminished. (Hear, hear, from Mr Baring.) What? did he hear a cheer from any gentleman opposite? or was the cheer from him who had often taken part in debates on this subject, and who must, therefore, be well acquainted with the truth of the fact which he was alluding to? Did the honourable gentleman mean that the representation of the paper was right? If so, he should certainly move a resolution on the fact, and have it officially before the house. (Move, move! from the opposition benches.) He disdained those sneering cries, because he knew that there was no person who would venture to call upon him seriously for proof of a fact which was in evidence before the house. It was already known, that during the first three months after the issuing of Buonaparte's decrees, until the orders in council were adopted, our trade had not only diminished, but was entirely at a stand; that there were no exports, and that many of the cargoes which had cleared the river for the continent were obliged to be relanded. The insurance was even so high as 60 per cent.; so that scarcely any underwriter was to be found who would subscribe one. This was a stubborn fact, and yet, in defiance of such a truth, there were men who could be base enough to mislead poor ignorant ma nufacturers, and make them attribute to the orders in council, and the government who advised them, all the evils of their present condition. Such a bold and rank imposture he would not impute to any member of that house, because he was aware that the intentions of them all were pure; but he would say, that such an imposture must proceed from a French party,

animated by French spirit, imbued with French principles, entertaining French views, discontented with their own government, and willing to rush upon measures that must be fatal to all that Englishmen hold dear, to the freedom that Englishmen cherish, and the independence, without which they would not care to exist. Such an imposture as this, in such a country, and under such a government, was unparalleled in the baseness and proffigacy of mankind. In justice to the poor deluded manufacturers, he wished to see these detestable arts abandoned; and this effort of his indignation was directed to no other purpose. He begged the lurking authors of those misrepresentations to look to the consequences; to see that they were only paving the way for the ravages of military force, and exposing the nation to a deluging waste of blood. The honourable and learned gentleman then proceeded to shew, that in the six months subsequent to the issuing of the orders in council, the country had reached a pitch of prosperity unknown at any former period of our history, that our exports were unexampled, amounting to no less an excess than ten millions. After this statement, he would put it to the candour of the honourable gentleman, whether he was fair in the introduction into his speeches of those little episodes on the orders in council; whether his custom of flinging a remark or two on this subject into the context of his casual speeches, was altogether very gracious, when he always declined making any specific motion,-any motion that could be distinctly met by the evidence of facts which were too strong to be broken down. The honourable gentleman was always carping at the orders in council, save the first two years, when he thought it convenient to be silent on their effects; and now again he came forward with his views,