the sake of which we have sacrificed our rank among nations, our importance abroad, and our happiness at home! Oh right! more dear to us than our existence, which has already cost us so much, and which seems likely to cost us our all! Infatuated man!" fixing his eye on the minister, "miserable and undone country! not to know that the claim of right, without the power of enforcing it, is nugatory and idle. We have a right to tax America, the noble lord tells us; therefore we ought to tax America. This is the profound logic which comprises the whole chain of his reasoning. Not inferior to this was the wisdom of him who resolved to shear the wolf. What! shear a wolf! Have you considered the resistance, the difficulty, the danger of the attempt? No, says the madman, I have considered nothing but the right. Man has a right of dominion over the beasts of the forest; and therefore I will shear the wolf. How wonderful that a nation could be thus deluded. But the noble lord deals in cheats and delusions. They are the daily traffic of his invention; and he will continue to play off his cheats on this House, so long as he thinks them necessary to his purpose, and so long as he has money enough at command to bribe gentlemen to pretend that they believe him. But a black and bitter day of reckoning will surely come; and whenever that day comes, I trust I shall be able, by a parliamentary impeachment, to bring upon the heads of the authors of our calamities, the punishment they deserve."

IX.-BURKE ON THE NABOB OF ARCOT.

WHEN at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty, and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make a country, possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals, a memorable example to mankind. He resolved in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of his vengeance, and to put per

petual desolation as a barrier between him and those, against whom the faith which holds the moral elements of the world together, was no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy, and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation against the creditors of the nabob of Arcot-he drew from every quarter, whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of distress, and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all the horizon -it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents on the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a

scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of, were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, and destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity, in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest, fled to the walled cities. But escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into

"The jaws of Famine."

The alms of the settlement, in this dreadful exigency, were certainly liberal; and all was done by charity, that private charity could do-but it was a people in beggary: it was a nation that stretched out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days, had

fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without sedition, or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by a hundred a-day in the streets of Madras ;-every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India! I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to the heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is; but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the hearer; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on better thoughts, I find it advisable to throw a pall over this hideous object, and leave it to your general conceptions.

X.-SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH ON THE LIBERTY OF THE BRITISH PRESS.

UNFORTUNATELY for the repose of mankind, great states are compelled to consider the military spirit and martial habits of their people, as one of the main objects of their policy. Frequent hostilities seem almost the necessary condition of greatness; and, without being great, they cannot remain safe. Smaller states, exempted from this necessity, devoted themselves to the arts of peace, to the cultivation of literature, and the improvement of reason. They became places of refuge for free and fearless discussion; they were the impartial spectators and judges of the various contests of ambition, which, from time to time, disturbed the quiet of the world. If wars of aggrandizement were undertaken, their authors were arraigned in the sight of Europe. If acts of internal tyranny were perpetrated, they resounded, from a thousand presses, throughout all civilized countries.

Princes, on whose will there were no legal checks, thus

found a moral restraint which the most powerful of them could not brave with absolute impunity. No elevation of power, no depravity however consummate, no innocence however spotless, can render man wholly independent of the praise or blame of his fellows. These feeble states, these monuments of the justice of Europe, the asylum of peace, of industry, and of literature, the organs of public reason, the refuge of oppressed innocence and persecuted truth, have perished, with those ancient principles which were their sole guardians and protectors. They have been swallowed up by that fearful convulsion, which has shaken the uttermost corners of the earth. They are destroyed, and gone for ever!

One asylum of free discussion is still inviolate.-There is still one spot in Europe where man can freely exercise his reason on the most important concerns of society; where he can boldly publish his judgment on the acts of the proudest and most powerful tyrants. The press of England is still free! It is guarded by the free constitution of our forefathers; it is guarded by the hearts and arms of Englishmen; and I trust I may venture to say, that, if it be to fall, it will fall only under the ruins of the British empire. It is an awful consideration, gentlemen!-every other monument of European liberty has perished. That ancient fabric, which has been gradually reared by the wisdom and virtue of our fathers, still stands;-it stands, thanks be to heaven! solid and entire -but-it stands alone, and it stands amid ruins!

XI.-CURRAN'S DESCRIPTION OF AN INFORMER. THE learned gentleman is farther pleased to say, that the traverser has charged the government with the encouragement of informers. This, gentlemen, is another small fact, that you are to deny at the hazard of your souls, and on the solemnity of your oaths. You are, upon your oaths, to say to the sister kingdom, that the government of Ireland uses no such abominable instruments of destruction as informers. Let me ask you honestly, what do you

feel, when in my hearing, when in the face of this audience, you are called upon to give a verdict that every man of us, and every man of you, knows by the testimony of his own eyes, to be utterly and absolutely false? I speak not now of the public proclamations of informers, with a promise of secrecy and of extravagant reward;-I speak not of the fate of those horrid wretches who have been so often transferred from the table to the dock, and from the dock to the pillory;-I speak of what your own eyes have seen day after day during the course of this commission, from the box where you are now sitting; the number of horrid miscreants, who avowed, upon their oaths, that they had come from the very seat of government-from the castle, where they had been worked upon by fears of death, and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows, that the mild and wholesome councils of this government, are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man lies, till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up a witness! Is this fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him, after his resurrection from that tomb-after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked when he entered, how the stormy wave of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of deferential horror? How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death; a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote prevent : -there was an antidote-a juror's oath-but even that adamantine chain, that bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice, is solved and melted in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth; conscience swings from her moorings, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety, in the surrender of the

victim!