sess our understandings entire, and capable of stretching their views to the wide relations of civil life.

Your patriotic and manly proceedings have reached me in my peaceful retreat; and as the design of my periodical undertaking calls from me whatever efforts I can make in the cause of humanity and my country, I am happy to have found a set of men to whom I can with courage address myself, and to whose sanction I may with confidence recommend my endeavours for the common good. The discontents which have been sown with such industrious malignancy among our deluded countrymen, render every exertion necessary to disabuse all those whose enjoyment of the unexampled blessings which the present state of England holds out to them, has been transformed into a sour spirit of dissatisfaction, by the most unblushing mis-statements and the falsest theories.

But nothing so provokes our contempt, as the petulance with which these proud prophets of sedition predict the downfal of our national establishments. They assure us of this, as if it were a conclusion deduced from the quiet examination of the errors of our constitution; while they secretly presume upon the success of their own machinations, and are ready to charge upon the exaggerated corruptions of our political system whatever calamities may result from their own pestilential endeavours to disseminate false terrors and false feelings among the natives of this happy island. To conjure up fictitious grounds of complaint in the bosoms of those who confess themselves happy and content, and to persuade them to put every thing to hazard, in a state flourishing and exalted beyond all former experience, for the sake of giving a trial to theories, ex

travagant in their doctrines, and threatening in their forms, is an extent of turpitude that one must be wicked even to comprehend, and which is scarcely credible in Christians of the eighteenth century.

But what are these theories, that pretend to such wonderful illumination? that have marked so many thresholds with blood? that have sent the peaceful from their homes? that have been so fruitful in cold massacres and street butcheries? that have dictated a lengthened series of cruelty, wonderful for the unanimity by which it has been characterized, and the spirit of deliberation in which it has proceeded? and, to finish the picture, that have induced a whole nation to hold up with exultation to the eyes of mankind the saddest spectacle of human wretchedness that the heart can suggest-a man and a king, harassed for years with every mortification and misery that could affect him in either capacity; torn from his wife and his children; hourly trembling for their fate; and called out from his comfortless prison, only to witness fresh scenes of calamity, or to sanction some new insult upon his natural feelings, or invasion of his political rights?* Such have been the visible effects of these theories, as far as they have been attempted to be reduced to practice. In the mean time, their compensations have been none; since no establishments which promise any continuance, or which are suited to the circumstances of man in society, have yet succeeded to those which have been destroyed. It must be

owned, that in France they have expunged the abuses of the old government; but how have they done it ?-by annihilating government altogether.

Since this paper was written, their iniquity has been wound up; and every mind of common tenderness must have rejoiced in the catastrophe, melancholy as it was.

Like drugs of a baneful quality, they have cured the disorders of the state by the sorrowful resource of the grave.

But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that experience has proved a variety of substantial advantages to result to man from the adoption of these new theories; still it remains a question whether these advantages be sufficient to counterbalance the misery they have occasioned. But if their benefits have been purely negative, consisting only in the abolition of certain errors, while the positive abuses they have engendered are beyond all comparison more destructive and more durably calamitous than the evils they have removed, they stand without apology, and are deserving only of detestation and abhorrence. After such proofs of their dangerous tendency, it would be madness in an ill-governed state to hazard what mixture of good there might reside in its constitution, for the sake of doctrines which could only give them in exchange no government at all, and which, it might be easily shown, contain principles that wage eternal war with all political subordination, and that mark out a state of society which, however metaphysically imposing, has no foundation in nature, and makes no provision for the passions and propensities which belong to humanity.

If then, as it appears, a state whose constitution was inadequate to the purposes of good government, could only lose by taking in exchange such raw theories, for arrangements, at worst peaceable, I ask the plain sense of my countrymen, if it be the act of rational creatures to barter a constitution which, after having for ages been cherished in the speculations of wise men, has at last, in the only country which has been able to display it in prac

tice, produced an unexampled state of political prosperity; if it can be the wish of any but the most abused understandings, or the corruptest hearts, to barter such a constitution for schemes so crude and unaccommodating, of which no quiet experiment has yet been made, and which, as far as they have advanced in execution, have marked their footsteps with blood?

But the better to clear my ground, I must deny the solidity of any proofs which can be drawn from the actual state of America, in support of these new theories of government. We know that, in the first ardours of independence, a coarse levelling spirit was as rife in that country as it has since become among a neighbouring people; and we know too, that after sufficient experience of the miseries to which they conducted, the minds of these British descendants returned to their natural posture, their native character of sense and manliness emerged; and, having exposed them to the puerilities of their first essays in government, suggested a system in which human nature, as well as human rights, were taken into the account: in which, by some entrenchments on speculative liberty, the sum of practical freedom was increased; and in which securities were planted round man's social rights, by a necessary subtraction from those which belong to a state of nature.

I shall content myself, in this paper, with estimating the real value of these new lights in the theo. ry of government, and shall hope to demonstrate that, by reason of their inapplicability to human affairs, they would prove but a bad exchange for a very faulty constitution, supposing that constitution sufficient for the general purposes of order and civil restraint. If I shall have the good fortune to make this clear in my essay of to-day, I

shall hope, next Saturday, to place in their true point of obliquity the schemes of these destroying theorists, who would willingly scatter in the dust the monuments of British freedom, to make way for their houses of straw.

In the first place, I would caution my countrymen against the stale pretences, set up by these political doctors, to new lights and intelligence: the same doctrines have been preached in æras remote from the present, and have exalted their tones with unfailing constancy, when the times have been most favour able to their reception. They roared forth their incoherences with fanatical howlings, amidst the base hypocritical jargon of Cromwell's days; and having maintained but a short-lived credit in their native barbarity of form, they have since disguised them. selves in the dress of philosophy, and played upon us but too successfully with the false glitter of their borrowed trappings. We cannot expect to found an argument on many instances of their practical failure, since the repulsiveness of their nature to all political arrangements has denied them these opportunities of making so complete a display of the ignorance on which they are founded, and has stopped them short in their career, ere they could manifest their maturity of contradiction and plenitude of mischief.

Thus we see that in France, where the greatest struggle has been made to reconcile these abstracted rights of man with his actual interests, wants, and dependencies, nothing can endure that is made of such materials; and the vanity of their proceedings and fluctuation of their councils, the contradiction of their conduct and the unsteadiness of their professions, mark well the lubricity of all those principles which are not grounded in the real circumstances of man, and in the constitution of nature.

We have seen in that country a government over