ties of the Electoral College of the department of Dordogne, myself and my ally, the emperor of Russia, have made every effort to give peace to the world, but without success. The king of England, grown old in his hatred to France, wishes for war. His situation prevents him from feeling the calamities which it brings upon the world at large; or from calculating its results with regard to his own family. Nevertheless the war must come to an end, and we shall then be greater and more powerful than we have ever been. The French empire is in the vigor of youth; it cannot but grow and consolidate itself. That of my enemies is in the last stage of life; every thing presages its decay. Every year that they retard the peace of the world will only augment my power." This extraordinary reply of Napoleon proves most conclusively his utter impotence to injure Britain. His assertion that France is young and England old, &c. means, if it mean any thing, that France being young is unable to pay her debts; and has no means of subsistence but by having recourse to a system of perpetual war and plunder, which must speedily destroy her own power and strength; while Britain is so old as to administer justice to all her people, and to maintain a florishing state of finance, unexampled in the history of the world; to triumph by sea and land over all their enemies; and to grow progressively from year to year in all that imparts to a nation real prosperity and permanent vigor. But let the worst possible event happen to Britain; let her imitate the career of Revolutionary France; let her spunge her debt; confiscate all property; become in every sense of the word a bankrupt, in money, in reputation, in common honesty and common sense; commit all the bloody horrors of jacobinical infatuation; and terminate her labors of political regeneration in a military despotism; and what then? Why, according to Buonaparte's own doctrine, she

will then be "in the vigor of youth, and cannot but grow and consolidate" herself; she will then be in fact at least twenty years younger than France; and consequently, if there be any truth in Napoleon's revolutionary position, Britain will not then reach "the last stage of life," until France herself shall have been dead full twenty years. N. B. According to the sage policy of Buonaparte, the infallible recipe for making a nation young, is to cut the throats of its people from one end of the country to the other; and verily France has succeeded admirably in the experiment, for she at present exhibits the spectacle of a territory crowded with children, but containing scarcely a male grown up to man's estate.

The French government is fond of holding out to its people the example of republican Rome, who maintained her armies by the plunder of foreign states for more than one hundred years, without taxing the Roman citizens; whence the French people are desired to infer that they also shall soon cease to pay taxes when their Great Emperor can wholly subsist his troops upon the pillage of the remainder of the world. But in the first place, the Roman armies at that time were less numerous and far less expensive than those of France are now; and secondly, a great part of the plunder found its way into the public treasury, which during the period alluded to was carefully and parsimoniously administered by the government of Rome. Whereas the present French armies are not only far more numerous and expensive, but also very little of the pillage of the European continent can escape through the gripe of the numberless generals, princes, governors, ministers, commissaries, and all the hosts of public and private harpies of France, into the imperial exchequer.

France plunders Europe, and Buonaparte plunders France; and the whole pillage of exhausted Europe cannot satisfy the rapacity, or supply the

prodigal waste of himself, of his minions, and subordinate tyrants. How is he to bear the enormous expenditure of keeping an army of a million men on foot; that is, supposing the report of his Minister of Finance above alluded to, be in this respect true; besides all the charges of his civil government; his public functionaries, his police, his myriads of spies both at home and abroad; and all the long catalogue of expenses necessarily incident to a jealous and despotic government, always liable to the huge destruction of fraud and confusion? The various expedients to which France has already resorted, prove her extreme difficulty to raise money sufficient to meet her expenditure. She has issued government-paper which speedily became of no value; she has sponged her old and stopped the payment of her new debt; she has sold above a hundred millions sterling of confiscated property; she has pillaged and broken all her own banks; she has squeezed the Jews and money-brokers; she has robbed all the churches of popish Europe; she has plundered the Dutch, the Swiss, the Italians, the Prussians, the Germans generally, the Austrians, the Poles, the Danes, the Swedes, the Spaniards, and the Portugueze; and is at this moment unable to find funds even nearly sufficient to supply her expenditure.

Buonaparte may now, like Augustus, send forth a decree ordering all the world to be taxed; but all that part of the world which is under his dominion has not wherewithal to pay taxes. For they can only arise from the yearly reproduction of income, drawn from the proceeds of agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial industry; all of which the ravages of war, and the oppression of French despotism, have nearly destroyed over the whole continent of Europe. Napoleon is committing the old solecism of tyranny, in willing the end, and destroying the means necessary for the accomplishment of that end.

The plundering system prevents the means of reproduction by the great waste of property which it occasions; and also by deterring industry from all exertion; owing to the cutting away of all security of person and property. Buonaparte therefore by destroying all commercial and manufacturing industry only incapacitates the European continent from supplying itself with the necessaries and conveniences of life; and thus creates an increasing demand for British manufactures, which must be bought and used with in his own dominions; or a very large portion of his own subjects must become and continue, in name and in effect, veritable sans-culottes.

Add to all this, that despotism has uniformly a tendency to grow continually and rapidly weaker by its own corruptions. Already the throne of Napoleon is surrounded by parasites and flatterers; by minions and court-favorites. The men of gigantic talents who have forced themselves upwards during the effervescence of the revolution, must after a while disappear; and the jealous exclusive policy of Napoleon is not likely to appoint any very able successors to their offices of profit, of honor, or of trust.

Is it not allowable therefore to conclude, that the internal corruptions and weaknesses of France are so great as of themselves to presage and to ensure the speedy dissolution of that enormous fabric whose glare and bulk so far dazzle and confound the eyes of many beholders, as to induce them to imagine that it stands upon an indestructible basis; having for its pedestal the permanent subjugation of the whole continent of Europe? There are also some other, some external counter-checks to the permanency of French power, which shall now be laid before the reader.

See "Hints," pp. 413-513, for a more detailed and ample account of the internal condition of France; and the probable results to be expected from her present political, military, and financial system.

SECOND DIVISION.

IT was the wise and sound policy of the ancient conquerors of the world; of the Persians, the Macedonians, and the Romans, to secure the permanency of their conquests by disturbing as little as possible the religion, the laws, the habits, the customs, the manners, and the property of the people whom they vanquished. M. Montesquieu was so much struck with the wisdom of this mode of proceeding, that in his inquiry into the "Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Romans," he lays main stress upon what he calls "l'excellente politique de laisser aux vaincus leurs dieux et leurs coutumes," and considers it as one of the chief causes of the permanent extension of the Roman dominion. But the modern French, notwithstanding they profess to be sedulous perusers of Montesquieu's Grundeur et Decadence, and to be studious followers of the Roman march to universal empire, have made an entire change of every existing establishment and institution, their grand secret for reconciling the nations whom they vanquish to a cheerful acquiescence in the domination of their new lords. The first revolutionary chiefs changed all that they found standing in the countries which they conquered; so did all their various shortlived successors; and Buonaparte rigidly perseveres in the same policy.

Wherever the armies of Napoleon spread themselves all is confusion and dismay; the voice of woe and the groan of anguish are heard throughout all the habitations of the vanquished; every single dwelling, from the palace of the monarch in regular gradation down to the cottage of the peasant, is polluted by the presence, and smitten by the hand of