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ity, and was restrained in his career by the benevolent precepts which it inculcates! Was he? Let unfortunate Warsaw, and the miserable inhabitants of the suburb of Praga in particular, tell! What do we understand to have been the conduct of this magnanimous hero, with whom, it seems, Bonaparte is not to be compared? He entered the suburb of Praga, the most populous suburb of Warsaw; and there he let his soldiery loose on the miserable, unarmed, and unresisting people. Men, women, and children, nay,, infants at the breast, were doomed to one indiscriminate massacre. Thousands of them were inhumanly, wantonly butchered! And for what? Because they had dared to join in a wish to meliorate their own condition as a people, and to improve their Constitution, which had been confessed by their own Sovereign to be in want of amendment. And such is the hero upon whom the cause of religion and social order is to repose! And such is the man whom we praise for his discipline and his virtue, and whom we hold out as our boast and our dependence; while the conduct of Bonaparte unfits him to be even treated with as an enemy?

C. J. Fox.

SIR,

XCVI.

NATIONAL DISGRACE.

IR, we may look in vain to the events of former times for a disgrace parallel to what we have suffered. Louis the Fourteenth, a monarch often named in our debates, and whose reign exhibits more than any other the extremes of prosperous and of adverse fortune, never, in the midst of his most humiliating distresses, stooped to so despicable a sacrifice of all that can be dear to man. The war of the succession, unjustly begun by him, had reduced his power, had swallowed up his armies and his navies, had desolated his provinces, had drained his treasures, and deluged the earth with the blood of the best and most faithful his subjects. Exhausted by his various calamities, he offered his enemies at one time to relinquish all the objects for which he had begun the war. That proud monarch sued for peace, and was content to receive it from our moderation. But when it was made a condition of that peace, that he should turn his arms

against his grandson, and compel him by force to relinquish the throne of Spain, humbled, exhausted, conquered as he was, misfortune had not yet bowed his spirit to conditions so hard as these.

We know the event. He persisted still in the war, until the folly and wickedness of Queen Anne's ministers enabled him to conclude the peace of Utrecht, on terms considerably less disadvantageous even than those he had himself proposed. And shall we, sir, the pride of our age, the terror of Europe, submit to this humiliating sacrifice of our honor? Have we suffered a defeat at Blenheim? Shall we, with our increasing prosperity, our widely diffused capital, our navy, the just subject of our common exultation, ever-flowing coffers, that enable us to give back to the people what, in the hour of calamity, we were compelled to take from them; flushed with a recent triumph over Spain, and yet more than all, while our old rival and enemy was incapable of disturbing us, shall it be for us to yield to what France disdained in the hour of her sharpest distress, and exhibit ourselves to the world, the sole example in its annals of such an abject and pitiful degradation?

C. J. Fox.

XCVII.

A POLITICAL PAUSE.

WHERE then, sir, is this war, which is prolific of all these horrors, to be carried? Where is it to stop? Not till we have established the house of Bourbon! Or, at least, not until we have had due "experience" of Bonaparte's intentions! And all this without an intelligible motive. All this because you may gain a better peace a year or two hence! So that we are called upon to go on merely as a speculation. We must keep Bonaparte for some time longer at war, as a state of probation! Gracious God, sir! is war a state of probation? Is peace a rash system? Is it dangerous for nations to live in amity with each other? Are your vigilance, your policy, your common powers of observation, to be extinguished by putting an end to the horrors of war? Cannot this state of probation be as well undergone without adding to the catalogue of human sufferings?

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"But we must pause! says the honorable gentleman. What! must the bowels of Great Britain be torn out her best blood be spilled — her treasures wasted—that you may make an experiment? Put yourselves, oh! that you would put yourselves on the field of battle, and learn to judge of the sort of horrors that you excite! In former wars a man might, at least, have some feeling, some interest, that served to balance, in his mind, the impressions which a scene of carnage and of death must inflict.

If a man had been present at the battle of Blenheim, for instance, and had inquired the motive of the battle, there was not a soldier engaged who could not have satisfied his curiosity, and even, perhaps, allayed his feelings. They were fighting, they knew, to repress the uncontrolled ambition of the Grand Monarch.

But if a man were present now at the field of slaughter, and were to inquire for what they were fighting-"Fighting!' would be the answer; "they are not fighting; they are pausing." "Why is that man expiring? "Why is that other writhing with agony? What means this implacable fury?'

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must be, "You are quite wrong, sir, you deceive yourself they are not fighting, - do not disturb them pausing! This man is not expiring with not dead he is only pausing! Lord help you, sir! they are not angry with one another; they have now no cause of quarrel; but their country thinks that there should be a pause. All that you see, sir, is nothing like fighting- there is no harm, nor cruelty, nor bloodshed in it, whatever: it is nothing more than a political pause! It is merely to try an experiment — to see whether Bonaparte will not behave himself better than heretofore; and in the mean time we have agreed to pause in pure friendship!"

And is this the way, sir, that you are to show yourselves the advocates of order? You take up a system calculated to uncivilize the world to destroy order, - to trample on religion, to stifle in the heart, not merely the generosity of a noble sentiment, but the affections of social nature; and in the prosecution of this system, you spread terror and devastation all around you,

C. J Fox.

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XCVIII.

WASHINGTON'S SWORD AND FRANKLIN'S STAFF.

THE

HE Sword of Washington! The Staff of Franklin! O, sir, what associations are linked in adamant with these names ! Washington, whose sword was never drawn but in the cause of his country, and never sheathed when wielded in his country's cause! Franklin, the philosopher of the thunder-bolt, the printing-press, and the ploughshare! What names are these in the scanty catalogue of the benefactors of human kind! Washington and Franklin! What other two men whose lives belong to the eighteenth century of Christendom, have left a deeper impression of themselves upon the age in which they lived, and upon all after-time? WASHINGTON, the warrior and the legislator! In war, contending, by the wager of battle, for the Independence of his country, and for the freedom of the human race, ever manifesting, amidst its horrors, by precept and by example, his reverence for the laws of peace, and for the tenderest sympathies of humanity; in peace, soothing the ferocious spirit of discord, among his own countrymen, into harmony and union, and giving to that very sword, now presented to his country, a charm more potent than that attributed, in ancient times, to the lyre of Orpheus.

FRANKLIN! The mechanic of his own fortune; teaching, in early youth, under the shackles of indigence, the way to wealth, and, in the shade of obscurity, the path to greatness; in the maturity of manhood, disarming the thunder of its terrors, the lightning of its fatal blast; and wresting from the tyrant's hand the still more afflictive sceptre of oppression: while descending the vale of years, traversing the Atlantic Ocean, braving, in the dead of winter, the battle and the breeze, bearing in his hand the Charter of Independence, which he had contributed to form, and tendering, from the self-created nation to the mightiest monarchs of Europe, the olive-branch of peace, the mercurial wand of commerce, and the amulet of protection and safety to the man of peace, on the pathless ocean, from the inexorable cruelty and merciless rapacity of war.

And, finally, in the last stage of life, with fourscore winters upon his head, under the torture of an incurable disease, return

in the struggle of the Revolution? Were they devoted exclu sively to the duties and enjoyments of the fireside? When the soldiers were destitute of clothing, or sick, or in prison, from whence did relief come? From the hearts where patriotism erects her favorite shrine, and from the hand which is seldom withdrawn when the soldier is in need. The voice of our history speaks trumpet-tongued of the daring and intrepid spirit of patriotism burning in the bosoms of the ladies of that day "Politics," sir, "rushing into the vortex of politics!" They gloried in being called rebel ladies, refusing to attend balls and entertainments, but crowding to the hospitals and prison-ships! And, sir, is that spirit to be charged here, in this hall where we are sitting, as being "discreditable" to our country's name? So far from regarding such conduct as a national reproach, I approve of it, and glory in it.

J. Q. Adams.

C.

VALUE OF POPULARITY.

MY Lords, I come now to speak upon what, indeed, I would

have gladly avoided, had I not been particularly pointed at for the part I have taken in this bill. It has been said by a noble lord on my left hand, that I, likewise, am running the race of popularity. If the noble lord means by popularity, that applause bestowed by after-ages on good and virtuous actions I have long been struggling in that race; to what purpose, all trying time can alone determine: but, if the noble lord means that mushroom popularity which is raised without merit, and lost without crime, he is much mistaken in his opinion.

I defy the noble lord to point out a single action of my life, in which the popularity of the times ever had the smallest influence on my determinations. I have a more permanent and steady rule for my conduct, -the dictates of my own breast. Those that have foregone that pleasing adviser, and given up their mind to be the slave of every popular impulse, I sincerely pity: I pity them still more, if their vanity leads them to mistake the shouts of the mob for the trumpet of fame. Experience might inform them, that many who have been saluted with the huzzas

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