A Historical Survey of the Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, with a View to explain the Causes of the Disasters of the late and present Wars. By Gould Francis Leckie, Esq. Pp. 272. 8vo. Close print.

WE

WHAT has been so often observed, that our British orators and statesmen of the present times are by no means so learned as those that flourished from the reign of queen Elizabeth to that of queen Anne, both inclusive, is not the less important that the observation is common. In those times public speakers, and actors in the political drama, were profoundly read in the history of nations, antient and modern, and formed their plans in new cases, from those that bore the greatest affinity to them in preceding times. They drew their maxims from the stores of literature and philosophy; and, in short, they treated, much more than we do, notwithstanding the natural progress of refinement, politics as a science. Our public speakers, it is evident, if they be really learned men, and have drawn much from the stores of history, and moral science, hide their talents in a napkin, and affect, nothing so much as wit, brilliancy, and even length of declamation.— As to our men in public offices, or statesmen, the progress of offi. cial consequence and power is described by Mr. Leckie with a melancholy and alarming fidelity.

“A young man, of a powerful family, comes from the university into parliament; he had made a very fine oration in the theatre be fore the vice-chancellor and many

of the nobility; he had received an honorary premium for his performance. Under these auspices he gets up in the house of commons, where the elegance of his language and the roundness of his periods gain him universal applause. He is considered as a young man of promising abilities, and is destined to be a future member of the cabinet. He thus serves his apprenticeship under the minister of the day, and is thereby initiated into the rou tine of public business. From that moment his time is not his own, a multiplicity of papers are put into his hands, and the page of history is thenceforward closed to his inspection. His future political career is traced on the model of that of his predecessor; and as his habits of thinking are formed upon example, he becomes a minister without having once thought for himself on the most important subjects.

"An inferior class sometimes rises into notice, from a long employment in the public offices; and as their education has consisted either in copying papers, or wording official letters and dispatches, according to formule placed before them, these are also men of rou. tine.

"From these two classes have been drawn the principal men whỏ have guided the helm of the state of late years: but while they have the means of acquiring a perfect knowledge of its interior concerns, and may often do so in a very emi. nent degree, they are still totally incapacitated from obtaining even the rudiments of information on the foreign relations of the government. It is very easy to see that

such

such men, in arriving at their dignities, must necessarily have acquired all the prejudices of their, predecessors, engrafted on the habits of office, which have deprived them of the time necessary to deep reflexion; they cannot, therefore, be very open to the representations of those whose lives have been spent in travel, and in actual ob. servation, who have attentively pe. rused the history of past times, who have compared them with the present, who have caught the habits and entered into the spirit and principle of foreign governments, and who have thus learnt to appreciate the probabilities of events; who, in the prosecution of their local inquiries, have visited the palaces of princes and the cottage of the peasant."

In politics, as in law, plures sunt casus quam leges.-A revolution, a catastrophe, has happened in Europe, to which the usual system of balancing power among dif. ferent states is wholly inapplicable. The floods are out, and overflow the land. The landmarks disappear. We must pursue a new course, steering not in the trammels of precedent and mere official routine, but by the compass of reason enlightened by history.

The reasoning of Mr. Leckie, founded on a very comprehensive view of both history and the present state of the world, merits the most serious attention, and will, we doubt not, obtain it. His doc. trine is not of a melancholy or despairing kind.-It appears to be the only system by which we may maintain, together with our com. mercial prosperity, our national independence.

The nature and design of this

very interesting work is briefly set forth by the author in an introduction.

"The events of the war which we are now waging, have already proved that all attempts to preserve the balance of power on the conti nent must in the end be nugatory. Two great powers now divide nearly the whole of it, and whatever assistance we give to either of them, may probably tend to no permanent good; so that the safest policy seems to be to look to ourselves for that security which we have hitherto founded on a precarious balance, and which has cost us so much treasure to maintain. This doc. trine is now pretty nearly esta blished, and the present alliance with Russia will perhaps be the last essay on the folly of coalitions!Whether we pay subsidies to the Russians to attack France, or vice versa, the result must be equally' useless; if either of them be too powerful for the other, it is not our money, nor the handful of men which we can furnish to either par. ty, that will determine the contest. Should one of them over-run the whole, a state so formed must fall to pieces in a few years, and the favorite balance of power will be alternately erected and overthrown. But the empire of the sea will always balance that of the land, whether it be in one or more hands. And the example of the republic of Rhodes, which made so long a resistance to Rome, at a time when navies were not what they are at the present day, ought to teach us that our views should be confined to islands, or transmarine possessions.

"The following tracts have been written as the successive transactions

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suggested the matter, result from the writer's having been an atten. tive spectator of them during the whole war, from its commencement after the death of Louis XVIth to the present time. Events have crowded so fast on each other, that their cause and spirit cannot at first sight be easily discovered; but this is evident to all, that the French have been successful in almost all their attempts, that they have totally changed the face of Europe, while the British government seems never to have been guided in its conduct by any general abstract principle, nor by any great and philosophic view of human events; but rather to have suffered its mea. sures to be determined by some bias it received at the moment.

"Had the ministers of the crown attentively read the history of those countries where their arms have been engaged, or to which their views have been turned, they could never have sent expeditions abroad, called forth by the reliance upon false hypotheses, and in no way adapted either to the circumstances of the country which was the ob ject of them, nor tending to any one advantage, in the event of success. "Thus the conduct of our ar mies being cramped by considerations quite foreign to the real state of affairs, can produce no advantage, while the principle on which we carry on the war in ge. neral defeats its own object; and the diplomatic agents we employ abroad are either so confined by

the orders transmitted to them, the nature of their powers, or, as more frequently happens, by their own want of abilities, that wherever we find the British government concerned, we see the want of energy and decision, and inconsistency and weakness in all our measures. This opinion is now so deeply rooted in the minds of foreigners, that no party have any confidence in us, and our national credit is daily suf. fering depreciation. While the French were consolidating a great empire in Europe, we have been afraid to pursue the war with vigour, least our success should excite the jealousy of our allies; and this sentiment, the offspring of ti midity, has lowered us in the esteem of other nations, and become the subject of severe sarcasm, or contemptuous ridicule.

"The tracts contained in this volume may serve to elucidate the foregoing assertions, and at the same time satisfy us, that we have not only the means of commanding the respect, bus also of gaining the confidence, of other nations; that the present war, were it conducted with a different spirit and more enlarged views, would produce not only the security which we declare to be its object, but also lay the foundation of a grandeur and duration far exceeding that of any empire which ever yet existed. To the attainment of that end, the present system, or that followed during the administration of the immortal Pitt, cannot be subser.

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vient.

We must be led to it by principles resulting from the evi dence of facts, and confirmed by the repeated testimony of the most authentic historical records.

"But even though all the points which it was intended to establish in the course of the following tracts, should not have been made out equally to the satisfaction of the reader, it is hoped they will have received illustration, and that the truth, to whatever side it may incline, will be found corroborated by some new arguments, or more competent evidence.

"We have no other resource than to shut our enemies within the continent, and debar them as much as possible from any foreign com. merce by sea. On this system the scheme of an insular empire presents itself as the most obvious method to maintain our independence and power. Let us begin from the northward, and pass in review all the islands bordering on the continent of Europe."

On the question of public justice, Mr. Leckie quotes an essay of Mr. Hume's on that subject.

"Suppose (says he) that it should be a virtuous man's lot to fall into a society of ruffians, remote from the protection of laws and government, what conduct must he embrace in that melancholy situation? He sees such a desperate rapaciousness prevail, such a disregard to equity, such a contempt of order, such stupid blindness to future consequences, as must immediately have the most tragical conclusion, and must terminate in de struction to the greater number, and in a total dissolution of society to the rest. He meanwhile can have no other expedient than to

arm himself, to whomsoever the sword he seizes or the buckler may belong, to make provision of all means of defence and security; and his particular regard to justice being no longer of use to his own safety, or that of others, he must consult the dictates of self-preservation alone, without concern for those who no longer merit his care and attention.

"The predicament of the British empire is precisely the same with Mr. Hume's virtuous man-she is remote from the protection of laws and government; for what supe rior can Great Britain appeal to, to redress her wrongs, when she is pressed upon by the insatiable ambition of Bonaparte; for we have never yet heard of any Amphictionic council in Europe able to redress the wrongs of nations. The only means left us are anticipating inju. rics by injuries, or avenging them by retaliation. It is for us to seize the sword and buckler, to whomsoever it belong, and to convert it to our own advantage and preserva. tion. None of our philanthropic philosophers seem to have reflected that this is precisely the position of the British empire; hence their reflexions on public justice are always at variance with the grandeur, the prosperity, and even the safety of the empire."

It is our opinion that there never was more seasonable advice, than what is here offered by Mr. Leckie, given to any nation, on a more important occasion.

and Manufactures; of the Population, -Cities, Towns, Villages, &c. of each County. By Robert Forsyth, Esq. Advocate. Five large 8vo. Volumes, embellished with Engravings.

A

PRECEDING article carries our views back to the past; this presents a view of the present state of Scotland, which appears to be very prosperous. Mr. Forsyth is ad. vantageously known as a writer on agriculture and morals. The present highly variegated and magni. ficent work will not detract, but add to his reputation. To a great mass of selection from the statisti. cal accounts published by sir John Sinclair, travellers, and other writers on the affairs and present state of Scotland, he has added much original information, derived from actual observation as well as private intelligence, and many inge. nious and useful remarks of his own. The whole is arranged in a natural, proper, and beautiful or. der; clothed in perspicuous, proper, and unaffected language; and replete with anecdotes, interesting not only to the natives of particular counties or provinces, and to all natives of Scotland, but many of them to readers in general. The engravings are, on the whole, very fine, though not all of equal beauty. It would be difficult to conceive a publication, whether for design or execution, more calculated for both amusement and use ful or practical information. Nor has Mr. Forsyth by any means been inattentive to the progress and present state of literature and science in Scotland. We farther observe, that he is an excellent critic in literary composition.

Scotland is shaped by the hand of Nature into three divisions: one lying between the English border and the isthmus formed by the ap. proximation of the Forth and the Clyde; a second between these friths and the chain of bays and lakes that have invited the forma tion of the Caledonian canal; and a third, consisting of the greater part of Invernessshire, Rossshire, Sutherlandshire, and Caithness. Mr. Forsyth has, with great judgment, exhibited a general view of the physical geography of Scotland, by quotations from general Roy's Military Antiquities, in vol. i. p. 412, when he comes to the Lammer Muir Hills, the boundary between Berwickshire and East Lothian; and in volume iii. p. 539, when. crossing the Forth, he proceeds in his description along the northeastern coast. And this he does, in the first place, on account of the resemblance which both the face of the country and the original race of people bear to those he had already described, reserving as much as possible the north-western country of Scotland, or the Highlands, for the latter part of his work. In his wide range he keeps a constant and an intelligent eye on the various objects mentioned in his title page, mingling, in the happiest manner, the utile with the dulce. The MANNERS of the people, the most interesting head, is not noticed in the title page, but largely insisted on. As Edinburgh has for some time been a very famous seat of literature and science, and is resorted to by stu dents from every part of both Eu rope and America, as well as by crowds, we had almost said, of youth from the different provinces

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