erroneously taken up; the author commits it to a more durable form than it at first assumed.

If it be too much to hope that it will do any thing towards checking the strong current of what he conceives an erroneous opinion; it is very possible a recurrence to it on a future day may show the necessity of a more critical investigation of ministerial pretensions, in time to prevent the mischief that must ensue from allowing them to pass current upon the world.

If there be nothing in a revision of the premises to excite a desire to alter them; so neither has the author found a motive for such desire in any thing that has since occurred.-In the Times of the 22nd of February, a miserable "If" of Buonaparté, (the strongest evidence that he cannot cheer his Myrmidons with the least hope of a connexion with America in the war,) is distorted into an alliance with that country. And, in the same paper of the 6th instant, the epithets of forgery and perjury, that have been used again and again in our own Senate, not only against American certificates of citizenship, but, unfortunately with too much truth, against the very measure to which the President of the United States applies them, have stamped his Message with the character of a document of the most violent and infuriated description. So cruelly have the public been deceived in respect to the question of the wanton impressment of American seamen, that a man shall walk from Hyde Park corner to Charing Cross, and from Charing Cross to the Exchange, without meeting a subject that does not believe that the cause of complaint is on the side of Great Britain. Nay, the capture of our frigates is unblushingly, and very generally, ascribed to the disaffection of our own seamen fighting for America, with a rope round their necks. Whereas it is notorious all over America, and has been officially communicated to

I

this Government more than four years ago, "that already the ships of war of the United States had been ordered not to receive any of them, and to discharge such as were at that time on board;" although we have seen no reports of any such being found on board the Nautilus that fell without resistance into the hands of our men of war; nor on board the Wasp, whose crew, after the capture of the Frolic, cannot be rated inferior to any; nor on board the United States, where, on the contrary, the officers of the Macedonian are said to have made diligent scrutiny without finding a single Englishman or English boy, save one solitary lad of sixteen.-If this report be untrue; the Purser, who is in England, can contradict it.

But the obvious cause of those disasters that have lowered that Pavilion that has hitherto rode proud Autocrat of the mountain wave, is the last to be taken into the account.-We look not to the numbers of those men who have been drilled to the trade of death, on board our own Men of War, by a discipline that taught their arm to fight, while it filled their bosoms with that deliberate vengeance that renders discipline invincible. And yet to understand this, we are only to consider what we should expect from our own men, dragooned and scourged, in the same manner, on board the ships of any foreign nation in the world.-If we believe that an honest English Tar would fight on his stumps in such a case, when his legs were shot away; why should we doubt the American doing the same? One would suppose there could hardly be a want of physical strength, or moral valor, in such a man, while a vein of his body was undrained.

'Erskine to Canning 4th Dec. 1808,

Time was, when so direct a consequence of such a crying sin would have been considered a visitation of providence. So evident a concatenation of the crime and the penalty rarely occurs; but we will not see it. Ten minutes is ample time to perceive it; but it will take ten years to comprehend it.-In about that time, perhaps, all the world will be of one opinion on the subject; as now, on the long contested question of the American revolution. This is the usual course of things-Labitur et labetur-In about that time too, we shall discover that the American propositions on this subject did not exact the surrender of any one of our Maritime Rights, but only such wholesome (it may be said profitable) modification of the practice as would remove a question involving every thing valuable in life, and life itself, from a party tribunal.--We need not look forward indeed for the evidence of this; we may find it in the letter of instructions of Mr. Madison to Messrs. Monroe and Pinkney of so old a date as the seventeenth of May, 1806; where the proposition is not only reduced to a stipulatory form, which leaves the British principle untouched; but is made in the very words that were agreed to by Lord St. Vincent, with the acquiescence of Lord Hawkesbury and Mr. Addington, in the project of a convention with Mr. King on the approaching renewal of the war; and then only frustrated by an exception on the obsolete ground of peculiar privilege in the narrow seas.-But we will look forward; and we will not believe a thing that happened seven years ago till ten years hence.-About that time too, we shall discover that the Commissioners, appointed in the Fox administration, to treat with the American Commissioners, waited only for the subsiding of a popular prejudice (most artfully raised by their opponents in politics) to accommodate and ad

just this matter to the satisfaction of all concerned. This may be easily perceived now, in their subsequent correspondence with Mr. Canning; but we will not see it in less than ten years, unless, (which God grant) we should agree on similar terms with some little technical difference; and then it will be all fair enough to say they would have done it.

The subjoined correspondence' with the Editor of the Times, part of which has been printed in that paper and part refused insertion, is added with an equal view to exhibit these subjects in the light which the author conceives to be the true one; with equal apprehension of the small chance of their meeting attention at present, and with equal confidence that time will develope the truths they contain ;-the truths;-for, be it remembered, they pretend to no prophetic character; nor will the author vouch for the correctness of any conjecture that. these publications may contain.-There is an opinion hazarded, for example, in the letter of the 24th of October last to the Editor of the Times, that Marquis Wellesley differed pretty stoutly from his colleagues on the American subject; yet his Lordship is reported to have said since, in the House of Lords, that the American government had been affected with a deadly hatred towards this country, and a deadly affection towards France. This tended to invalidate the former opinion; and now Vetus,. who is supposed to know the noble Marquis's sentiments as well as his own, comes forward to say that he would have proposed more conciliatory measures to America (an idea that his intercourse with the American legation does not discourage ;) and that, had he failed here, he

2

These will be given in our next No. ED.

2 Vide Letters from a Cosmopolite to a Clergyman, p. 21, 31, and 46.

would have taken more vigorous measures against them. The heart of a statesman is a bottomless pit.-If we can suppose, with Vetus, that his Lordship contemplated, or proposed to his late colleagues, measures of greater conciliation with America, than they were willing to adopt; we may take him with us beyond a satisfactory arrangement of the question of impressments, (which he knew to be the sine qua non,) to the restoration of the ships taken under the Orders in Council; which is clearly to be inferred by what he said on the subject to Mr. Smith; (the American Chargé d'Affaires ;') nor is it improbable that this is one of the cases on which he differed from his colleagues. If this were the view of the Noble Marquis, the prosecution of it would evidently have saved him the trouble of trying his second alternative; and on the contrary, the troops in Canada and Nova Scotia might have formed the garrison of Santona, or have been employed in a flying squadron in the Bay of Biscay, to land occasionally under some one of the heroes of the Peninsula, to the great annoyance of Marmont, and the completion of that destruction of his army, which his noble brother had so well begun at Salamanca.

What can have led the noble Marquis to think that his conciliatory measures would not have produced this effect, it is difficult to imagine. And one must suppose that he has that idea when he charges the Government of the United States with a deadly hatred to England, and a deadly affection for France. "Il n'appartient qu'aux grands hommes d'avoir des grands dé fauts." Perhaps his serene highness is thrown into a passion whenever the language of Mr. Pinkney's letter