sitive persons, and fair-minded citizens, are desired to examine, before they decide; and even if they expose the errours of our judgment, they will advance our purpose, inasmuch as we wish, and it shall be our endeavour to extract from foreign events, the sound materials for political instruction. We leave it to the jacobin editors to cook for their readers a mawkish aliment for prejudice and faction.

SUCH readers believe, that, while Great Britain is on the verge of bankruptcy and ruin, while she is loathsome in her corruptions, and humbled by her fears and her defeats, France is renewing her youth and vigour, happy in her liberty, and strong by her victories. A European would scarcely believe there was in America enough of what, in other countries, is called mob, to give currency to such glaring falsehood.

FRANCE has used, from the first, revolutionary means, in other words, all that violence could procure. While England, with difficulty, taxed income, her rival could, by a decree, 'seize the capital; and after it had been sold to revolutionary buyers, the next men in power could decree, that these were royalists, and seize it a second time: every change brought the whole stock to the new mint. One would expect, that France was of all nations the richest in resources; since it could spend all, and then attack the new holders of property, and spend it as often as the necessities of liberty might require. By a formal decree, all property in France has been declared in a state of requisition. The whole people were also enrolled and in requisition; and death, or confiscation of the offender's property, ensued on disobedience. Never did Eastern despotism claim more tremendous power, or actually exercise so much. Yet violence is ever a temporary resource: it is a fire, whose splendour is brilliant ruin. France is now destitute of credit, of revenue, of all the ordinary means to extract resources from her people; and she has used and abused the extraordinary, till they are almost as unproductive, as they are odious. She looks for means abroad; she looks to Portugal, to Italy, to Spain, and to Holland. The field of plunder will not bear two crops, and it is already barren. Buonaparte, of course,

sees the varnish of his popularity wearing off, and the hopes of his slaves fading into disappointment. Already he fears the effects of that temper of the French, which is ever patient under tyranny, but ever eager to establish a new tyrant. He sees Egypt nearly wrested from his domination; his splendid promises of wealth and glory, in an expedition to subvert the British dominion in India, vanish into air; the powers of the North, whom he duped and betrayed, beaten into a better understanding of the law of nations, and embittered against their deceiver; Germany, though too discordant to oppose him in the field, yet too powerful to submit to his dictates. The secularization of the ecclesiastical states, is too much the concern of Russia and Prussia, to be carried along on the terms of the treaty of Luneville. He also needs peace to consolidate his power, and to give a breathing spell to his exhausted subjects, and also to induce his triumphant enemy to disarm. But, if the English populace have bread, and the English minister has sense and spirit, the affair of peace will be decided on other grounds, than Buonaparte's desire to obtain it. It will be asked, what has England to fear from war? What has she not to fear from peace? War brings no burdens, of which they have not had experience; no evils, but such as they have surmounted. Peace will be a new and untried state of being, requiring all the burdens of war taxes, and war forces, and giving no respite to Englishmen, while it affords one to France. The revolutionary fire is not quenched; and peace would leave it to blaze out again in three years, with a fiercer conflagration and a wider ruin than ever.

FOREIGN POLITICKS. N°. III.

FEW subjects are considered with so little care, and so much party feeling and prejudice, as the political situation of France. In respect to her neighbours, she is supposed to possess a power as durable as it is preponderant; and, with respect to her own citizens, she is deemed to be as happy as

victory, plenty, and liberty can make her. The grounds of these darling errours might be explored with advantage; but it would fill all the columns of a newspaper, and, indeed, the pages of an octavo volume, to exhibit the subject in detail. Men more competent, than we pretend to be, must write books; and persons more at leisure, than the majority of our readers, will read them. A brief and rapid summary of the most signal facts and principles, is all that we presume to undertake, and even for that, the materials are scanty, and the rage of party has confused and mutilated them. Every booby democrat from France comes home to brag of the power and splendour of the court of Buonaparte, and of the pure republicanism and equality of that nation, as if he had exactly the same measure of understanding, as of patriotism. It is well recollected, that, while Robespiere reigned, and the blood ran in Paris, Bourdeaux, Lyons, and Nantz, in streams, that would have turned corn-mills, every ship's captain arrived with such a tale for the jacobin newspapers, as would suit the fashion of our market: it seemed as if lies were bespoke and made for customers. All was then represented as peace and order, a stable government, and a contented, happy, prosperous people. The zeal for France invited deception, and sheltered it from scrutiny. The jacobins still prefer France to America, and try very hard to “cover her with glory," when she is defeated, and to represent the "cowardly English" as ruined, when they conquer. Accordingly, Egypt is still, in the Chronicle, a burying ground for the English, where they die of the plague, and by the sword of Menou, and by that of the mamelukes and Arabs, and thus the Chronicle thrice slays the slain; yet, probably, Egypt is now in the full possession of the English and Turks. In this case, one of the supposed difficulties in the way of peace is removed; for if Buonaparte holds Egypt, it can only be to make it a military post, from which, within two years from the signing of a peace, to send forth armies against the British possessions in India. A peace, on such terms, would be a truce altogether favourable to Buonaparte, unfavourable to England. If the spirit of the British nation

is up, the minister will not feel himself obliged to submit to any such insidious, and indeed hostile, arrangement. The loss of Egypt will remove this bone of contention.

YET, as France is too powerful to allow her neighbours any repose, the only question seems to be, not whether England shall lay aside her arms, for that is impossible, even in peace, but whether they shall be idle in her hands. While she is in danger, she must make all her efforts in self-defence; and surely every jacobin has enough of the Frenchman in his heart to allow, if he will speak out, that he would use the opportunity of peace to prepare the force, and the first moment of sedition or insurrection in England, or the decease of king George, or any other favourable event, to employ force, to overturn that cursed monarchy, and to strip that nation of its navy, commerce, and power. In this state of things, it seems justifiable for the British minister to ponder well, whether, if safety lies, as it certainly does, in arms, which is the best time to employ them, the present, or some future, and not distant time, that France shall seize, when England is in a state of division and dismay. The question is important, and concerns her political life or death.

It has been already observed, that the British land and naval forces cannot be much reduced on a peace. Austria is recruiting her armies, and will soon have need of them, especially if she is believed to be unprepared for war. Peace will lessen the energies of war, but not its burdens. It will, at least in some degree, restore the commerce and navy of Britain's great rival, while her own trade and industry, now secure in a monopoly, will then have to struggle with competition. France is now nearly stript of all allies, except such as she has conquered. The independent powers are her foes in fact, or in sentiment and policy. Would it not then be strange, if Britain should purchase for herself a short truce, full of treachery and danger, that would refresh her enemy, and leave to her neither a respite nor the hope of advantage? The clamour for peace, so loud, while bread was scarce, ought now to subside in Eng

land; and if they are not willing to be Dutchmen or Cisalpines, they ought to be willing to be soldiers and seamen.

WAR is indeed a great evil, but peace, with danger and dishonour, is a greater. It has been the fashion to make it a merit for any man to desire peace; as if the question of peace was to be considered in the abstract, and as if the war that rages was not a case, like every other, to be examined and pronounced upon according to its existing circumstances.

SUPPOSING, then, the war should continue, because the ambition of France still thirsts for conquest and plunder, and because the English government seeks, what peace would deny her, security and repose, what are the chances of this mighty and long-protracted contest? England is all powerful at sea; France has hitherto proved victorious on land. Thus far the odds are in favour of England, because she can annoy France, she can insult her coasts, she can prevent her commerce from reviving, and thus she can distress her enemy in his supplies and his finances. France threatens England with invasion is not the threat ridiculous? Two or three hundred English ships and frigates will almost touch one another in the channel, and effectually prevent a fleet of French flat-bottomed boats from landing an army by surprise. An English army of three hundred thousand men, fighting for life, liberty, and property, would destroy any hostile force that might be disembarked. The immense land force of France seems to be, therefore, nearly useless in the war with England. It serves, however, to consume her own resources, and to keep alive the jealousy and hatred of her neighbours. Rome subsisted her armies by plunder: a war found its own means of supply; and from the time of Perseus to the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, the spoils of Macedon and other conquered states, supplied all expenses; so that, for more than one hundred years, no taxes were imposed on the Roman people. Let it be noted, however, that modern wars glean infinitely less from the field of plunder; while they cost, for artillery, sieges, and cavalry, infinitely more. To this add the Roman soldiers feared the Gods, and religiously kept their oath, to bring all the plunder