swamped themselves in the Serbonian bog of Frenchpolitics.*

All those who have cast their view over the eventful series of human actions and crimes which of late years has laid waste the fairest portions of the earth, and has caused that century, which in its beginning wore an angel form, to assume towards its close the features of a demon, and then to vanish in a shower of blood; will unanimously attribute all the horrorsthat have lately darkened, and that still continue to darken the horizon of our existence, to the agency of jacobinism. Jacobinism first taught its votaries, primarily in France, and then in the other countries of the globe, to cherish and to disseminate all that licentiousness of opinion which spurns at the influence of habit, discards the experience of former times, and annihilates the tender and elevated feelings of the human heart; which beating down the standard of moral obligation, raised by the hand of God himself, and revealed in His own divine word, presumes on every question to decide merely according to the dictates of personal convenience and selfish appetite; which justifies the means by the end, prefers atheism to christianity, and subjects every being on whom it can lay its grasp to the desolation of rapine and murder; and all for the general good; good so very general that it destroys all individual happiness.

The fire of jacobinism had long been pent up in the bowels of continental Europe, until at length, after having in secret consumed the bands of religion and of honor, it burst forth into the French revolution, which has convulsed all the civilized earth to its basis; has changed the aspects and relations of the moral and political world; and has made all things, human and divine, to become confusion worse confounded. With a lie in her right hand, and with

For farther particulars on this subject see "Hints," pp. 580-604-617.

the fellest malignity rankling in her heart, she has uniformly declared, and even now (in 1810,) has the impudence to declare, that France never did, nor does now entertain any desire of foreign conquest; that all the schemes of domination and aggrandizement, so generally supposed to have influenced the mighty views of Richelieu, of Louvois, and of Buonaparte, are calumnies invented by the enemies of France and of universal peace. We are daily and hourly told, that France always did and does now abhor every intention of disturbing other countries; of subverting their established governments; of destroying their national independence; and of annihilating their rights and privileges. All her contests are contests of self-defence.

And when we ask how it happens that these marvellous and exalted principles have not yet produced these beneficial results; have not yet created nor established the social and domestic happiness of the human race? And when we add that this self-same system of eternal peace has engendered a more extensive and a more bloody warfare; that this universal philanthropy has given birth to a series of more general and complicated calamities and horrors than have ever been produced by all the combined efforts of the other corrupted institutions of society, savage and civilized, ancient and modern; we are told, that the despots of the earth alone, and more particularly the "perfidy and atrocity of the British government, are worthy of censure for not gratefully receiving the blessings proffered to them; and if we still presume to pause and to doubt, we are bidden to cast our eyes upon the emancipated and happy state of Spain, of Portugal, of Italy, of Holland, of Sweden, of Denmark, of Switzerland, and of all that vast portion of the Germanic empire which enjoys the protection and kindness of France.

A very slight examination of the subject will ena

ble any man of common understanding to perceive that jacobinism rests on a theory, fallacious and impracticable; growing out of an entire ignorance of the nature and end of man, and utterly subversive of the very existence of all civilized communities. Accordingly, we have seen in France, within the short compass of the last twenty years, all the elements of human society cradled in blood; and as the only means of restraint upon the ferocity of jacobinized man in the absence of all law human and divine, a military despotism enforced in all its rigor; a military despotism which sports with the lives, plunders the property, and manacles the thoughts, words and deeds of the French people, in a far greater degree than the Sublime Porte and all his hordes of Janisaries dare to inflict upon their slaves. And joined to the most unqualified tyranny at home, the tyrant carries into effect the most destructive schemes of foreign domination; thus rendering the people upon whom he tramples as on the dust beneath his chariot-wheels, at once the instruments of their own desolation, and the curses and the destroyers of all the surrounding nations.

In this forced and frenzied state of society, France, although streaming with the blood of her own people, possesses for a while vast power of plunging other countries into the gulph of her own misery, without having the least ability to lighten the burden of her own sufferings. It is well known that her foreign system, on which she has acted with little or no variation, excepting at occasional short intervals of feebleness and indecision in some few of her administrations, ever since the commencement of the reign of Louis the Eleventh; and on which she now acts with more determination and industry than ever; forbids to every other country the hope of safety from her forbearance. Wherever she can make an impression by force or fraud, by allurements or by terror,

by menaces or by blandishments, she will not be deterred by any obligation of treaties, nor be diverted by any law of God or man, from pursuing her plan of establishing one, universal, French sovereignty over all the earth.

And let it never be forgotten, that her foreign system of aggrandizement by conquest must always bear along with it her domestic system of rapine, violence, and bloodshed; and that every nation which either bows beneath her sword, or receives her protection, must see all its institutions entombed in one common grave. In that hour all the privileges and distinctions of the different orders of the community; all the most sacred and endearing relations of social and domestic life; the personal security, the property, the rights, the conveniences, the comforts, the enjoyments of every individual; the last faint beamings of religion; the twilight and the day of hope; all that can render human existence dignified, desirable, and lovely, will be swept away into the charnel-house of death.

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That the revolution has increased the irreligion, profligacy, and misery of France, the voices of all testimonials, oral and written, unanimously concur to prove. Amid an innumerable host of witnesses examine the depositions of "The Revolutionary Plutarch," The Cabinet of St. Cloud," and Goldsmith's "Secret History of the Cabinet of Buonaparte," or if the evidence of these works should be deemed unsatisfactory and doubtful, the most confident appeal might be made to the late Mr. Wyndham's speech against the peace of Amiens; to Sir James M'Intosh's speech on the trial of M. Peltier, in the year 1803; and to Mr. Walsh's "Letter on the Genius and Disposition of the French Government;" as tracing with felicitous, boldness, and decisive wisdom, the necessary and natural progress of the anarchy which sprung up from the subversion of moral duty and so

cial order, to its termination in a military despotism; which itself augments the atrocity and horror of that very impiety and immorality which first entailed on France her present excess of wretchedness.

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The existing misery of the internal condition of France, and her extreme profligacy, are also fully verified by a vast body of interesting and important facts stated in pp. 1006-1011, in Vol. 6th, of the Literary Panorama," published in London; a work too little known in this country, but extremely valuable for the purity of its religious tenets, the soundness of its political principles, and the extent and variety of its information. See also "Travels through the South of France," &c. in 1807-1808, by Lieutenant Colonel Pinkney, of the North American Native Rangers, 1 Vol. 4to. published in London in 1809. From Mr. Pinkney we learn that the proportion of vessels on the seas is at least two hundred English to one French; that within a few miles of Paris every vestige of a metropolitan city disappears, the scenery and objects being as retired as in the most remote corner of England; the number of carriages of all kinds that daily enter and leave the eities of Paris and London is as one to a hundred, &c. &c. "The real State of France in the year 1809," &c. by Charles Sturt, Esq. late M. P. for Bridport, published in London in 1810, likewise gives a most lamentable account of the misery of the French people; which may be also sufficiently learned by Buonaparte's own decree, dated March 3d, 1810, by which he erects in his dominions eight new bastiles for the purpose of incarcerating those of his subjects "whom" (in the words of this decree) "it is not convenient to bring for trial before the courts of justice, nor to set at liberty." And accordingly, on the 10th of April, 1810, M. Gellert, a respectable merchant at Bourdeaux, was committed to one of these bastiles for having doubted in a public company the le