dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own.. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the Constitution.

From the tapestry that adorns these walls, the immortal ancestor of this noble Lord frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country! In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion, the Protestant religion of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition, if these worse than popish and inquisitorial practices are let loose amongst us, to turn forth into our settlements, among our ancient friends and relations, the merciless cannibal, thirsting for the blood of man, woman, and child.

To send forth the infidel savage, against whom? Against your Protestant brethren! to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name, with these horrible hell-hounds of savage war!-hell-hounds, I say, of savage war! Spain armed herself with blood-hounds to extirpate the wretched natives of America; and we improve on the inhuman example of even Spanish cruelty: we turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties, and religion; endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity.

My Lords, this awful subject, so important to our honour, our Constitution, and our religion, demands the most solemn and effectual inquiry. And I again call upon your Lordships, and the united powers of the State, to examine it thoroughly and decisively, and to stamp upon it an indelible stigma of the public abhor

rence. And I again implore those holy prelates of our religion to do away these iniquities from among us. Let them perform a lustration; let them purify this House and this country from this sin.

My Lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and my indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, or have reposed my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.

ARRAIGNMENT OF MINISTERS.

EDMUND BURKE.

I CONFESS I feel a degree of disgust, almost leading to despair, at the manner in which we are acting in the great exigencies of our country. There is now a bill in this House, appointing a rigid inquisition into the minutest detail of our offices at home. The collection of sixteen millions annually, a collection on which the public greatness, safety, and credit have their reliance; the whole order of criminal jurisprudence, which holds together society itself, — has at no time obliged us to call forth such powers; no, nor any thing like them. There is not a principle of the law and Constitution of this country that is not subverted to favour the execution of that project.

And for what is all this apparatus of bustle and terror? Is it because any thing substantial is expected from it? No. The stir and bustle itself is the end proposed. The eye-servants of a short-sighted master will employ themselves, not on what is most essential to his affairs, but on what is nearest to his ken. Great

difficulties have given a just value to economy; and our Minister of the day must be an economist, whatever it may cost us. But where is he to exert his talents? At home, to be sure; for where else can he obtain a profitable credit for their exertion? It is nothing to him, whether the object on which he works under our eye be promising or not. If he does not obtain any public benefit, he may make regulations without end. Those are sure to pay in present expectation, whilst the effect is at a distance, and may be the concern of other times and other men.

On these principles he chooses to suppose (for he does not pretend more than to suppose) a naked possibility, that he shall draw some resource out of crumbs dropped from the trenchers of penury; that something shall be laid in store from the short allowance of revenue officers, overladen with duty, and famished for want of bread. From the marrowless bones of these skeleton establishments, by the use of every sort of cutting and every sort of fretting tool, he flatters himself that he may chip and rasp an empirical alimentary powder, to diet into some similitude of health and substance the languishing chimeras of fraudulent reformation.

Whilst he is thus employed according to his policy and to his taste, he has not leisure to inquire into those abuses in India that are drawing off money by millions from the treasures of this country, and are exhausting the vital juices from members of the State, where the public inanition is far more sorely felt than in the local exchequer of England. Not content with winking at these abuses, whilst he attempts to squeeze the laborious, ill-paid drudges of English revenue, he lavishes in one act of corrupt prodigality, upon those who never served the public in any honest occupation at all, an

annual income equal to two-thirds of the whole collection of the revenues of this kingdom.

Actuated by the same principle of choice, he has now on the anvil another scheme, full of difficulty and desperate hazard, which totally alters the commercial relation of two kingdoms; and, what end soever it shall have, may bequeath a legacy of heart-burning and discontent to one of the countries, perhaps to both, to be perpetuated to the latest posterity. This project is also undertaken on the hope of profit. It is provided that, out of some (I know not what) remains of the Irish hereditary revenue, a fund at some time, and of some sort, should be applied to the protection of the Irish trade.

Here we are commanded again to task our faith, and to persuade ourselves that, out of the surplus of deficiency, out of the savings of habitual and systematic prodigality, the Minister of wonders will provide support for this nation, sinking under the mountainous load of two hundred and thirty millions of debt. But whilst we look with pain at his desperate and laborious trifling, whilst we are apprehensive that he will break his back in stooping to pick up chaff and straws, he recovers himself at an elastic bound, and, with a broadcast swing of his arm, he squanders over his Indian field a sum far greater than the clear produce of the whole hereditary revenue of the kingdom of Ireland.

Strange as this scheme of conduct in Ministry is, and inconsistent with all just policy, it is still true to itself, and faithful to its own perverted order. Those who are bountiful to crimes will be rigid to merit, and penurious to service. Their penury is even held out as a blind and cover to their prodigality. The economy of injustice is, to furnish resources for the fund of corruption.

Then they pay off their protection to great crimes and great criminals, by being inexorable to the paltry frailties of little men; and these modern flagellants are sure, with a rigid fidelity, to whip their own enormities on the vicarious back of every small offender.

REVOLUTIONARY DESPERADOES.

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.

THE French Revolution began with great and fatal errors. These errors produced atrocious crimes. A mild and feeble monarchy was succeeded by a bloody anarchy, which very shortly gave birth to military despotism. France, in a few years, described the whole circle of human society. All this was in the order of Nature. When every principle which enables some men to command, and disposes others to obey, was extirpated from the mind by atrocious theories, and still more atrocious examples; when every old institution was trampled down with contumely, and every new institution was covered in its cradle with blood; there remained only one principle strong enough to hold society together, -a principle utterly incompatible, indeed, with liberty, and unfriendly to civilization itself,

a tyrannical and barbarous principle, but, in that miserable condition of human affairs, a refuge from still more intolerable evils; — I mean the principle of military power, which gains strength from that confusion and bloodshed in which all other elements of society are dissolved, and which, in these terrible extremities, is the cement that preserves it from total destruction.

Under such circumstances, Buonaparte usurped the supreme power in France; - I say usurped, because an