mittee of general defence, in presence even of the patriot deputies of Holland, you have no ecclesiastical goods to offer us for our indemnity.-IT IS A REVOLUTION IN THEIR COUNTERS AND IRON CHESTS,* that must be made amongst the DUTCH. The word was said, and the bankers Abema and Vanstaphorst understood it.

Do you think that that word has not been worth an army to the Stadtholder, that it has not cooled the ardour of the Dutch patriots, that it has not commanded the vigorous defence of Williamstadt ?

Do you believe that the patriots of Amsterdam, when they read the preparatory decree which gave France an execution on their goods; do you believe, that those patriots would not have liked better to have remained under the government of the Stadtholder, who took from them no more than a fixed portion of their property, than to pass under that of a revolutionary power, which would make a complete revolution in their bureaus and strong boxes, and reduce them to wretchedness and rags ? Robbery, and anarchy, instead of encouraging, will always stifle revolutions.

But why, they object to me, have not you and your friends chosen to expose these measures in the rostrum of the National Convention? Why have you not opposed yourself to all these fatal projects of union?

There are two answers to make here, one general, one particular.

You complain of the silence of honest men' You quite forget, then, honest men are the objects of your suspicion. Suspicion, if it does not stain the soul of a courageous man,

them to us as good Frenchmen. I put them to the proof. Where are the legions? How, thirty thousand Savoyards-are they not armed to defend, in concert with us, their liberty? Brissot.

* Portefueille—is the word in the original. It signifies all moveable property which may be represented in bonds, notes, bills, stocks, or any sort of publick or private securities. I do not know of a single word in English that answers it; I have therefore substituted that of Iron Chests, as coming nearest to the idea. Translator.

In the original letter, les reduire a la Sansculoterie.

at least arrests his thoughts in their passage to his lips. The suspicions of a good citizen, freeze those men, whom the calumny of the wicked could not stop in their progress.

You complain of their silence! You forget, then, that you have often established an insulting equality between them and men covered with crimes, and made up of ignominy.— You forget, then, that you have twenty times left them covered with opprobium by your galleries.

You forget, then, that you have not thought yourselves sufficiently powerful to impose silence upon these galleries.

What ought a wise man to do in the midst of these circumstances? He is silent. He waits the moment when the passions give way he waits till reason shall preside, and till the multitude shall listen to her voice.

What has been the tactick displayed during all these unions? Cambon, incapable of political calculation, boasting his ignorance in the diplomatick, flattering the ignorant multitude, lending his name and popularity to the anarchists, seconded by their vociferations, denounced incessantly as counter-revolutionists, those intelligent persons who where desirous, at least, of having things discussed. Το oppose the acts of union, appeared to Cambon an overt act of treason. The wish so much as to reflect and to deliberate, was in his eyes a great crime. He calumniated our intentions. The voice of every deputy, especially my voice, would infallibly have been stifled. There were spies on the very monosylla. bles that escaped our lips.****

LETTER

TO WILLIAM ELLIOT, ESQ. OCCASIONED BY THE AC-
COUNT GIVEN IN A NEWSPAPER OF THE SPEECH

MADE IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, BY THE **** OF
******* IN THE DEBATE CONCERNING LORD

FITZWILLIAM.

1795.

MY DEAR SIR,

Beaconsfield, May 26, 1795.

I HAVE been told of the voluntary, which, for the entertainment of the house of lords, has been lately played by his Grace the **** of ******* a great deal at my expense,

and a little at his own. I confess I should have liked the composition rather better, if it had been quite new. But every man has his taste, and his Grace is an admirer of antient musick.

:

There may be sometimes too much even of a good thing. A toast is good, and a bumper is not bad but the best toasts may be so often repeated as to disgust the palate, and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate and overload the stomach. The ears of the most steady-voting politicians may at last be stunned with three times three. I am sure I have been very grateful for the flattering remembrance made of me in the toasts of the revolution society, and of other clubs formed on the same laudable plan. After giving the brimming honours to citizen Thomas Paine, and to citizen Dr. Priestley, the gentlemen of these clubs seldom failed to bring me forth in my turn, and to drink, "Mr. Burke, and thanks to him for the discussion he has provoked."

I found myself elevated with this honour; for even by the

collision of resistance, to be the means of striking out spark

les of truth, if not merit, is at least felicity.

Here I might have rested. But when I found that the great advocate, Mr. Erskine, condescended to resort to these bumper toasts, as the pure and exuberant fountains of politicks and of rhetorick, (as I hear he did, in three or four speeches made in defence of certain worthy citizens) I was ra her let down a little. Though still somewhat proud of myself, I was not quite so proud of my voucher. Though

he is no idolater of fame, in some way or other, Mr. Erskine will always do himself honour. Methinks, however, in following the precedents of these toasts, he seemed to do more credit to his diligence, as a special pleader, than to his invention as an orator. To those who did not know the abundance of his resources, both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicated the want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, in the magazine of topicks and common-places, which I suppose he keeps by him, in imitation of Cicero and other renowned declaimers of antiquity.

Mr. Erskine supplied something, I allow, from the stores of his imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs, into solemn special arguments at the bar. So far the thing shewed talent: however I must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with still older pricked election port; then the acid of the wine made some amends for the want of any thing piquant in the wit. But when his Grace gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff, which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts; the drug made up of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork and of the cask, and of every thing except the honest old lamp, and when that sad draught had been farther infected with the gaol pollution of the old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed, and ineffectually stummed again into a senatorial exordium in the house of lords, I found all the high flavour and mantling of my honours, tasteless, flat, and stale,

Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes, and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.

I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age to the publication of their opinions; I mean citizen Thomas Paine, and his Grace the **** of *******. I am not so great a leveller as to put these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republick of letters: but, "the field of glory is a field for all." It is a large one indeed, and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the boundless expanse of that wild heath, whose horizon always flies before us. I assure his Grace (if he will yet give me leave to call him so) whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs, or of the bar, that citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who only moves as I drag him along), has a sufficient activity in his own native benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead for himself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel the constitution of his country, without any provocation from me, or any encourgement from his Grace. I assure him, that I shall not be guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work against religion and human society, upon his Grace's excellent speech in the house of lords. I farther assure this noble Duke, that I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government, loaded with all its encumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its commons and its beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to provoke a jockey