tion, the origin of a middle class throughout Christendom, and with it the true balance of society, the parent of international law, the foster-nurse of general humanity, and (to sum up all in one) the main principle of attraction and repulsion, by which the nations were rapidly though insensibly drawing together into one system, and by which alone they could combine the manifold blessings of distinct character and national independence, with the needful stimulation and general influences of intercommunity, and be virtually united without being crushed together by conquest, in order to waste away under the tabes and slow putrefaction of a universal monarchy. This boasted Pacificator of the World, this earthly Providence, as his Catholic Bishops blasphe • It has been well remarked, that there is something far more shocking in the tyrant's pretensions to the gracious attributes of the Supreme Ruler, than in his most remorseless cruelties. There is a sort of wild grandeur, not ungratifying to the imagination, in the answer of Timur Khan to one who remonstrated with him on the inhumanity of his devastations: cur me hominem putas, et non potius iram Dei in terris agentem ob perniciem mously call him, professes to entertain no hope of purchasing the destruction of Great Britain at a less price than that of the barbarism of all Europe! By the ordinary war of government against government, fleets against fleets, and armies against armies, he could effect nothing. His fleets might as well have been built at his own expence in our Dockyards, as tribute-offerings to the Masters of the Ocean and his Army of England lay encamped on his Coasts like Wolves baying the Moon! Delightful to humane and contemplative minds was the idea of countless individul efforts working together by a common instinct and to a common object, under the protection of an unwritten code of religion, philosophy, and common interest, which made peace and brotherhood co-exist with the most active hostility. Not in the untamed Plains of Tartary, but in the very bosom of civilization, and him humani generis? Why do you deem me a man, and not rather the incarnate wrath of God acting on the earth for the ruin of mankind? self indebted to its fostering care for his own education and for all the means of his elevation and power, did this genuine offspring of the old serpent warm himself into the fiend-like resolve of waging war against mankind and the quiet growth of the world's improvement, in an emphatic sense the enemy of the human race! By these means only he deems Great Britain assailable, (a strong presumption, that our prosperity is built on the common interests of mankind!)—this he acknowledges to be his only hope and in this hope he has been utterly baffled! To what then do we owe our strength and our immunity? The sovereignty of law: the incorruptness of its administration; the number and political importance of our religious sects, which in an incalculable degree have added to the dignity of the establishment; the purity, or at least the decorum of private morals, and the independence, activity, and weight, of public opinion? These and similar advantages are doubtless the materials of the fortress, but what has been the cement? What has bound them together? What has rendered Great Britain, from the Orkneys to the Rocks of Scilly, indeed and with more than metaphorical propriety a BODY POLITIC, our Roads, Rivers, and Canals being so truly the veins, arteries, and nerves, of the state; that every pulse in the metropolis produces a correspondent pulsation in the remotest village on its extreme shores! What made the stoppage of the national Bank the conversation of a day without causing one irregular throb, or the stagnation of the commercial current in the minutest vessel? I answer without hesitation, that the cause and mother principle of this unexampled confidence, of this system of credit, which is as much stronger than mere positive possessions, as the soul of man is than his body, or as the force of a mighty mass in free momotion, than the pressure of its separate component parts would be in a state of rest-the main cause of this, I say, has been our NATIONAL DEBT. What its injurious effects on the Literature, the Morals, and religious Principles, have been, I shall hereafter develope with the same boldness. But as to our political strength and circumstantial prosperity, it is the national debt which has wedded in indissoluble union all the interests of the state, the landed with the commercial, and the man of independent fortune with the stirring trades, man and reposing annuitant. It is the National Debt, which by the rapid nominal rise in the value of things, has made it impossible for any considerable number of men to retain their own former comforts without joining in the common industry, and adding to the stock of national produce; which thus first necessitates a general activity, and then by the immediate and ample credit, which is never wanting to him, who has any object on which his activity can employ itself, gives each man the means not only of preserving but of encreasing and multiplying all his former enjoyments, and all the symbols of the rank in which he was born. It is this which has planted the naked hills and enclosed the bleak wastes, in the lowlands of Scotland not less than in the wealthier districts of South Britain: it is this, which leaving all the other causes of patriotism and national fervor undiminished and uninjured, has added to our public duties the same feeling of neces |