which might ensure its prosperity. The Imperial flag soon covered the ocean; his ships, or rather ships bearing the Imperial ensign, were seen passing to and from every quarter of the globe; English, Dutch, and French, alike availed themselves of its protection: such was the demand for storehouses, at Ostend, that no price was thought too great for them; and the Emperor consented that houses should be built on the ramparts for the accommodation of the merchants who flocked to the great emporium. His Majesty visited the place in person, gave orders for enlarging the basin, advanced considerable sums for its improvement, consulted with the ablest men, and desired them to give him their respective opinions, as to the best mode of attaining his object. English merchants were generally applied to for this purpose; and had the maritime war continued, it is probable that its increase might have repaid all his cares and expenses: but that which depends on a state of hostility, or on any contingency not natural to man, seldom outlives the cause of its birth; Ostend sank to its former level the moment the peace, of Paris rendered the protection of its flag no longer useful to commercial enterprise. Situated in a swamp, with a bad harbour, at all times difficult of access, and on a coast whose dangers in winter are incalculable, it is not probable that any legislative enactments could again confer on it those riches which it owed to a fortuitous combination of events.

While the Emperor was engaged in his plans for the aggrandizement of Ostend, he did not neglect the opposite side of his dominions; he demanded, about the same time, from the Turks, the free navigation of the Danube and the Black Sea; established a factory at Triest; advanced funds to the merchants for the formation of a capital, and endeavoured, without much success, to establish a squadron of ships of war for the protection of his commerce in the Adriatic. But commerce is the child of liberty, not the puppet of despotism: a Berlin or Milan decree might impede its march, but if once extinct, the breath of a mighty Emperor could never rekindle the vital spark; and Ostend, Venice, and Triest, like

Antwerp and Amsterdam, have little else to shew than empty warehouses and unfrequented ports.

When the peace of 1783 had restored tranquillity to Europe, the Emperor of Germany, Joseph the Second, restless, ambitious, and fond of innovation, sought to embroil the continental powers by an unjust invasion of Holland. That unfortunate country was doomed to be the victim of France or Germany by land, and England on the ocean. The Emperor had passed through the United Provinces in the year 1781; and in the course of his journey had made such observations on their impoverished state, and the party spirit of the Dutch, as gave him reason to think he might not only re-open the Scheldt for the benefit of his dominions in the Netherlands, but also obtain other advantages from a nation already brought to the brink of ruin through the influence of France, at the Hague and Amsterdam.

The Belgic Provinces lying on the left bank of the Scheldt, between Holland and France, fell into the power of the house of Austria, in the year 1477, by the marriage of the Archduke Maximilian, with Mary, Duchess of Burgundy; since which time that country had been subject to the tyranny of a distant govern ment of a different religion, and unacquainted with the manners, habits, and language, of the people.

The persecutions of Charles and his successors, over the inheritance of the house of Burgundy, are too well known to be here repeated. In 1562, they caused the rebellion, which, after a war of eighty years, ended in the firm establishment of the house of Orange, and the separation of the Seven United Provinces from the country of Belgium. Holland, though much indebted to England for its independence, soon forgot its benefactor, and, at the instigation of the French, turned its arms against us: the two nations however mutually respecting each other, and discovering that the object of France was, by weakening both, to establish her power on the destruction of her rivals, concluded a peace which, to the honour of the respective governments, lasted one hundred years; and Holland night still have

been prosperous, but for her fatal connection with France, and the ambition of the Emperor, who, in 1784, seized on the fort of Old Lillo, which stands on the left bank of the Scheldt, opposite to the new fort of that name: the forts of St. Donat, St. Pierre, and Job, were soon after entered by the Austrian troops, and his Imperial Majesty demanded, at the same moment, the free navigation of the Scheldt, and the cession of Maestricht, the latter claim being founded on an obsolete agreement made with the Spaniards more than a century before.

Such was the political situation of Holland at the commencement of 1785; France pretended to arm in her defence; England sent over Sir James Harris to negociate; Russia desired peace, and prepared to enforce her command; and the Dutch, when their frontier was invaded, opened their sluices, and laid the country under water in the neighbourhood of Lillo and the Sas de Gand.

The city of Antwerp, which stands on the right bank of the Scheldt, twenty-four miles from Brussels and near eighty from the sea, formerly possessed great commercial and political consequence, particularly during the sixteenth century; but when the Netherlands revolted and threw off the yoke of Spain, it was taken by the Duke of Parma, and re- annexed to the Spanish monarchy, and has been ever since in the territory of Belgium, or the Austrian Netherlands, of which it is one of the principal cities; and would have been again a port of naval and mercantile importance, but for the jealousy of the Dutch, who, in conjunction with other powers of Europe, in the treaties of Munster and Westphalia, determined to shut up the river. This answered the purpose for which it was intended, by diverting the trade of the north of Europe to Amsterdam and the other ports of the republic, to the manifest injury of the Netherlands and the southern parts of Germany, which received their supplies by the canal of Brussels, and thence to the Rhine and Meuse through Maestricht, Liege, Aix la Chapelle, and Cologne. Without entering upon the question of policy, there appears a manifest injustice in denying to a people the use of a river which a bountiful Creator has given to them; and religion as well as ex

perience has taught us that whatever is founded in wrong cannot continue; nor is it to be supposed that a nation so fettered, and debarred the common rights of nature, would submit to its oppressors a moment longer than weakness rendered it expedient.

Had his Imperial Majesty been solely prompted by the love of his people, we might sympathize in his mortification; but an attentive view of the whole of these transactions will enable us to discover nothing but sordid and selfish motives, guided by the narrowest and most ignorant policy: and, though I am favourable to the freedom of the Scheldt, I must confess that the means adopted by his Imperial Majesty, to ascertain the extent of his rights on that river, proved his imbecility and want of decision. He ordered a small vessel, bearing his flag, to sail down from Antwerp; the Captain, having passed the fort of Lillo without examination, returned the same way in the afternoon, when he was stopped and boarded by the commanding officer of the Dutch guard-ship, who informed him that he might depart if he would engage not to renew the offence; the offer was rejected, and the Emperor considered this act of the Dutch government as a declaration of war. It is to be observed that in this vessel there were some Belgian magistrates, one of which was the bailiff of Beveren, an island on the left bank, who, in the name of the Emperor, claimed the right of free navigation on the Scheldt, which the Dutch as strenuously resisted. The dispute between these two powers had proceeded thus far, when the other courts of Europe, foreseeing that a war would involve them all, and that the result, always uncertain, might be ruinous to some, interfered to bring about a reconciliation. France was neither able nor willing to fight for the Dutch against England and Prussia; and the Empress Catharine, requiring the aid of the Emperor of Germany in the projects which she had in contemplation upon the Ottoman Porte, intimated to the Dutch to accept such terms as they could obtain, under pain of her displeasure. France paid four millions of florins, and Holland six millions, as a compensation to the Emperor for his idle and fraudulent claim on Maestricht; in addi

tion to which the Dutch were forced to pay five hundred thousand florins for damages sustained by the Belgians in the late inundation, although done to repel an unjust and cruel invasion, in which they themselves were the greatest sufferers. His Imperial Majesty had the free navigation of the Scheldt, from the city of Antwerp as far as Saftlingen, but not the ingress and egress of the river; thus giving up the chief point for which he had entered into the dispute, and the sole object worth contending for. The sum of money, which he had extorted from the unhappy Dutch, was no compensation to him for what he had expended in the invasion, or for the millions thrown away on the ports of Ostend and Triest, at the opposite extremes of his dominions. With his golden prospects, the Emperor not only resigned all claim to the free navigation of the Scheldt, but lost also the affections of his Belgian subjects, whom he began to oppress with projects of reform, and which, in the following history, will prove to have had very serious consequences.

In September 1785, disputes of a different nature occupied the people of Holland, and excited the solicitude of the courts of Europe. The Stadtholder, with his friends, were called the Orange party; their opponents, the Patriots; the former was supported by the King of Prussia (whose sister the Stadtholder, William the Fifth, had married), and by the cabinet of St. James's. The patriots were upheld by the court of Versailles, with which they were very honestly plotting (as will be shewn) the invasion of our Indian settlements. It was not till the year 1787 that Great Britain took an active part in this dispute, which began to threaten the repose of Europe.

Whatever reason there might have been in the claims of the Dutch patriots, they were speedily set at rest by the King of Prussia, who sent the Duke of Brunswick with a large army into the United Provinces, and restored the authority of the Stadtholder: the King of England, at the same time, increased his land and sea forces, in order to support his ally, and to counteract any movement on the part of France. Thirty sail of the