Is it said that religion will ensure the protection and blessing of Divine Providence upon Britain? Nay, but it has ensured this blessing and this protection. To what other cause than the signal blessing of Almighty God can the ingenuity of man attribute it, that Britain has stood erect and lofty; has enlarged the borders of her dominions; has increased in wealth, industry, and power beyond all example; has excelled in intelligence, piety, morals, valor, civilization, knowledge, in every nobler virtue and every polished grace: while the other nations of Europe have bowed their necks beneath the bloody dominion of frantic and impious France, while France herself has been for a series of years, and is now, a prey to an extent of desolation to which no tongue can give utterance, which no imagination can conceive; her whole people let loose from every salutary restraint of religion and of moral obligation, and presenting the hideous, loathsome spectacle of one entire mass of systematic and legalized corrup tion; her agriculture neglected, her external commerce annihilated, her internal trade stagnant, her manufactures drooping, her science and literature darkened almost to extinction, her whole community groaning under the most cruel and remorseless tyranny that ever bent the spirit of man to the earth, her sons dragged in chains to whiten with their bones, and moisten with their blood, the soil of other lands, while her deserted widows and fatherless babes lie mouldering in unburied heaps throughout every nook and corner of her swollen and overgrown empire?

Look at the contrast, look at Britain; see all her children protected in their equal rights by the unstained administration of equal justice; the full security of life, of liberty, and of property, preserved to all; a continual accumulation of wealth in all the departments of her dominions; an improved and im

proving system of agriculture; an extensive and extending commerce; manufactures thriving and increasing beyond all former parallel; the arts liberally patronised; science and literature in all their branches promoted; her lands, canals, houses, rivers, all presenting the most unequivocal proofs of incessantly progressive industry and prosperity; her people advancing in pure religion and sound morals, steady in their habits and manners; the enlargement of her territorial possessions by honorable conquest; her inexhaustible stock of talents, the living genius of freedom and intelligence which explores the powers and the recesses of nature to abridge and to embellish the productions of art, rendering knowledge tributary to the wants, the comforts, and the enjoyments, not only of her own offspring, but also of the whole human race.

For

Look at this contrast, and then say that the hand of Divine Providence is not in this matter. many more facts and observations respecting the political benefits derived to Britain from the religious and moral condition of her people, and the national calamities flowing out to Continental Europe from its impiety and profligacy, see "Hints," pp. 575-617.

How then is Buonaparte to destroy Britain, seeing that the English are so incalculably superior to the French in wealth, industry, courage, intelligence, religion, morals, freedom; in a word, in every thing which can render a nation permanently great and powerful?

"The decrees, the blockading decrees of the sagacious Napoleon," exclaim with one assent of universal uproar the partisans of France, "will speedily destroy the perfidious, cowardly English, and reduce them to slavery under the French power, by ruining the commerce of England," and so forth. I remember well, how fresh ebullitions of joy successively burst forth in this country, at the successive information of Buonaparte's having issued his Berlin, Milan, and Bayonne

decrees; after each of which it was most confidentially pronounced that "Britain could not hold out more than six months at the very farthest." And when our embargo was laid on in aid of the French decrees, it was predicted that "England would be a province of France in less than three months." The Berlin decree has been issued more than four years; and although the "six months," and the "three months," which were to complete the period of Britain's national existence, have passed away many times over, yet these undaunted political prophets still continue to rave forth their "demonstrations, that "England is now actually perishing from the operation of the French decrees." Indeed on all subjects relating to the British people, the political effusions of these statesmen surpass even the average duiness of democracy.

The very fact of Buonaparte's issuing these decrees is a full confession on his part, that he despairs of ever injuring Britain by fighting; whence he is desirous to aim at her ruin by bankruptcy, which is a very slow process, and tedious withal to a man of his impatient, military habits. An assassin who wished to murder a wealthy merchant in full credit, would hardly wait the tardy and uncertain event of his bankruptcy, if he could possibly accomplish the business more speedily by the dagger or the knife. The incessant pains also which Buonaparte takes to unite all the powers of continental Europe against Britain, in order to devise more effectual means of destroying her, is a conclusive proof that he finds the strength of the Great Nation alone utterly inadequate to effect this desired object. But the whole European continent has been already directed against Britain, under the auspices and genius of Napoleon, with no other effect than that of weakening the national resources, and preventing their re-production all over the continent, and of augmenting the wealth and power of the British Empire.

But happily we are not left to rely merely on inference respecting the conviction of Buonaparte that he has nothing to expect but disaster from fighting with Britain, and that his only forlorn hope, is to endeavor to bankrupt her, for we have his own declaration to that effect. In "Travels through the South of France," &c. in 1807-1808, made by permission of the French government, by Lieutenant-Colonel Pinkney, of the North American native Rangers, 4to. 1 vol. London, 1809, the author gives the following account of his being present at an audience given by the French Emperor in his palace at Paris. "Buonaparte now advanced to the imperial ambassador, with whom when present, he always begins the audience. He passed no one without notice, and to all the ambassadors he spoke once or twice. When he reached General Armstrong, he asked him, "if America could not live without foreign commerce as well as France?" and then added without waiting for an answer, "There is one nation in the world which must be taught by experience, that her merchants are not necessary to the existence of all other nations, and that she cannot hold us all in commercial slavery. England is only vulnerable in her (comptoirs) counting-houses."

It is a very fashionable doctrine among a large body of politicians in these United States, that "commerce invariably weakens, corrupts, and destroys every nation which has recourse to it, by making the people weak and dissipated, cowardly and vicious, and by diminishing the population. Witness the ruin of Carthage, Tyre, Sidon, Venice, Holland, and Rome in her decline, all of which nations perished on no other account, but because they were commercial. Whence it follows as an irresistible corollary, that the wisest policy of the United States will be to abandon the ocean altogether, and leave the corruptions of commerce to be at once the lure and the destruction of the slaves of Europe."

We have been endeavoring to draw this irresistible corollary for the benefit of the Union during the three last years, but have not yet been able to discern the wisdom of the policy of abandoning the ocean altogether, inasmuch as we were rich and prosperous while we ploughed the deep, and have become poor and needy in proportion as we have relinquished the corruptions of commerce to the slaves of Europe. The numberless beneficial results which flow from the prosecution and encouragement of trade to every nation, that happens to have sufficient sense, spirit, and virtue to cultivate it, are beyond all power of count and calculation, but the objections urged against trade are very easily shewn to be false and foolish. If it add nothing to national wealth and strength, why does Buonaparte so incessantly and strenuously endeavor to ruin the commerce of Britain as the only possible means of effecting her subjugation to France? If it add nothing to national wealth and strength, how is it that Spain, who three hundred years since was the most formidable nation in the world, has dwindled down into its present poor and feeble state, notwithstanding her boundless American colonies, and her inexhaustible mines of the precious metals, while Britain, who was three centuries ago comparatively an insignificant nation, is now become the most powerful State on the globe, although her little island yields no gold or silver mines, and is of narrow extent? How has this happened, but because Britain has been through a series of ages an enter prising commercial nation, and Spain has not understood and therefore has neglected trade?

Rome never was a commercial nation; in the earlier days of her republic she was foolish and ignorant enough to affect to despise trade, and in her decline the tyranny of her imperial government, (the object of Buonaparte's fond imitation,) entirely stifled and destroyed all the commerce of Europe. Tyre, Si