since. As to conquest, therefore, my lords, I repeat it, it is impossible. You may swell every expense and every effort, still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince,' that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are for ever vain and impotent-doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms-never-never-never.

But, my lords, who is the man that, in addition to these disgraces and mischiefs of our army, has dared to authorise and associate to our arms the tomahawk and scalping-knife of the savage? to call into civilised alliance the wild and inhuman savage of the woods; to delegate to the merciless Indian the defence of disputed rights; and to wage the horrors of his barbarous war against our brethren? My lords, these enormities cry aloud for redress and punishment; unless thoroughly done away, it will be a stain on the national character-it is a violation of the constitution-I believe it is against the law. It is not the least of our national misfortunes, that the strength and character of our army are thus impaired: infected with the mercenary spirit of robbery and rapine—familiarised to the horrid scenes of savage cruelty, it can no longer boast of the noble and generous principles which dignify a soldier, no longer sympathize with the dignity of the royal banner, nor feel the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, that make ambition virtue!" What makes ambition virtue ?-the sense of honour. But is the sense of honour consistent with a spirit of plunder or the practice of murder? Can it flow from mercenary motives, or can it prompt to cruel deeds? Besides these murderers and plunderers, let me ask our ministers, what other allies have they acquired? What other powers have they associated to their cause? Have they entered into alliance with the king of the gypsies? Nothing, my lords, is too low or too ludicrous to be consistent with their counsels.

The independent views of America have been stated and asserted as the foundation of this address. My lords, no man

(1) This was in allusion to the arrangement made with the Landgrave of Hesse for the supply of troops to aid the British army in America.

wishes more for the due dependence of America on this country than I do to preserve it, and not confirm that state of independence into which your measures hitherto have driven them, is the object which we ought to unite in attaining. The Americans, contending for their rights against arbitrary exactions, I love and admire; it is the struggle of free and virtuous patriots; but contending for independency and total disconnexion from England, as an Englishman, I cannot wish them success; for in a due constitutional dependency, including the ancient supremacy of this country in regulating their commerce and navigation, consists the mutual happiness and prosperity both of England and America. She derived assistance and protection from us, and we reaped from her the most important advantages: she was, indeed, the fountain of our wealth, the nerve of our strength, the nursery and basis of our naval power.

You cannot conciliate America by your present measures, you cannot subdue her by any measures. What then can you do? You cannot conquer, you cannot gain, but you can address; you can lull the fears and anxieties of the moment into an ignorance of the danger that should produce them. But, my lords, the time demands the language of truth: we must not now apply the flattering unction of servile compliance or blind complaisance. In a just and necessary war, to maintain the rights or honour of my country, I would strip the shirt from my back to support it. But in such a war as this, unjust in its principle, impracticable in its means, and ruinous in its consequences, I would not contribute a single effort nor a single shilling. I do not call for vengeance on the heads of those who have been guilty, I only recommend to them to make their retreat; let them walk off, and let them make haste, or they may be assured that speedy and condign punishment will overtake them.

My lords, I have submitted to you, with the freedom and truth which I think my duty, my sentiments on your present awful situation. I have laid before you the ruin of your power, the disgrace of your reputation, the pollution of your discipline, the contamination of your morals, the complication of calamities, foreign and domestic, that overwhelm your sinking country. Your dearest interests, your own liberties, the constitution itself, totters to the foundation. All this disgraceful danger, this multitude of misery, is the monstrous offspring of this unnatural war. We have been deceived and deluded too long;

let us now stop short; this is the crisis-may be the only crisis, of time and situation, to give us a possibility of escape from the fatal effects of our delusions. But if, in an obstinate and infatuated perseverance in folly, we meanly echo back the peremptory words this day presented to us, nothing can save this devoted country from complete and final ruin. We madly rush into multiplied miseries and "confusion worse confounded."

3. AGAINST EMPLOYING INDIANS IN THE
WAR.1

(A SPEECH DELIVERED THE SAME EVENING, NOVEMBER 18, 1777.) I AM astonished! shocked! to hear such principles confessed -to hear them avowed in this house or in this country:-principles equally unconstitutional, inhuman, and unchristian!

My lords, I did not intend to have encroached again upon your attention, but I cannot repress my indignation-I feel myself impelled by every duty. My lords, we are called upon as members of this house, as men, as Christian men, to protest against such notions, standing near the throne, polluting the ear of majesty "That God and Nature put into our hands!”I know not what ideas that lord may entertain of God and Nature, but I know that such abominable principles are equally abhorrent to religion and humanity. What! attribute the sacred sanction of God and Nature to the massacres of the Indian scalping-knife-to the cannibal savage torturing, murdering, roasting and eating-literally, my lords, eating—the mangled victims of his barbarous battles! Such horrible notions shock every precept of religion, divine or natural, and every generous feeling of humanity. And, my lords, they shock every sentiment of honour; they shock me as a lover of honourable war and a detester of murderous barbarity.

These abominable principles and this more abominable avowal of them, demand the most decisive indignation. I call upon that right reverend bench, those holy ministers of the Gospel, and

(1) Lord Suffolk, one of the secretaries of state, on the same evening, Nov. 18, 1777, had contended for the employment of the Indians, adding that "it was perfectly justifiable to use all the means that God and Nature put into our hands." Immediately after Lord Chatham rose and spoke as above. It has been objected against the speaker that he had himself done the very thing he now denounces in war, carried on in Canada nineteen years before, by his authority and under his own immediate superintendence. However correct this charge may be, it is plain that he now thought it wrong.

pious pastors of the Church-I conjure them to join in the holy work and vindicate the religion of their God. I appeal to the wisdom and the law of this learned bench to defend and support the justice of their country; I call upon the bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn,—upon the learned judges to interpose the purity of their ermine, to save us from this pollution. I call upon the honour of your lordships to reverence the dignity of your ancestors, and to maintain your own. I call upon the spirit and humanity of my country to vindicate the national character. I invoke the genius of the constitution. From the tapestry that adorns these walls,' the immortal ancestor of this noble lord2 frowns with indignation at the disgrace of his country. In vain he led your victorious fleets against the boasted Armada of Spain; in vain he defended and established the honour, the liberties, the religion—the Protestant religion-of his country, against the arbitrary cruelties of Popery and the Inquisition, if these more than popish cruelties and inquisitorial practices are let loose amongst us; to turn forth into our settlement, among our ancient connexions, friends and relations, the merciless cannibal thirsting for the blood of man, woman, and child! to send forth the infidel savage,against whom? Against your Protestant brethren; to lay waste their country, to desolate their dwellings, and extirpate their race and name with these horrible hell-hounds of savage war! —hell-hounds, I say, of savage war! Spain armed herself with blood-hounds to extirpate the wretched natives of America, and we improve on the inhuman example of even Spanish cruelty; we turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties, and religion,-endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity.

My lords, this awful subject, so important to our honour, our constitution, and our religion, demands the most solemn and effectual inquiry; and I again call upon your lordships, and the united powers of the state, to examine it thoroughly and decisively, and to stamp upon it an indelible stigma of the public abhorrence. And I again implore those holy prelates of our religion to do away these iniquities from among us. Let them perform a lustration ;-let them purify this House and this country from this sin.

(1) The tapestry, &c. This tapestry, representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada, was destroyed in the fire of 1834.

(2) Lord Howard of Effingham.

My lords, I am old and weak,' and at present unable to say more, but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.

DAVID HUME.2

1. DISCRETION.

(FROM " ESSAYS AND TREATISES ON SEVERAL SUBJECTS,"
PUBLISHED IN 1742.)

THE quality, the most necessary for the execution of any useful enterprise, is Discretion; by which we carry on a safe intercourse with others, give due attention to our own and to their character, weigh each circumstance of the business which we undertake, and employ the surest and safest means for the attainment of any end or purpose. To a Cromwell, perhaps, or a De Retz, discretion may appear an alderman-like virtue, as Dr. Swift calls it; and, being incompatible with those vast designs, to which their courage and ambition prompted them, it might really in them be a fault or imperfection. But in the conduct of ordinary life, no virtue is more requisite, not only to obtain success, but to avoid the most fatal miscarriages and disappointments. The greatest parts (talents) without it, as observed by an elegant writer, may be fatal to their owner; as Polyphemus, deprived of his eye, was only the more exposed, on account of his enormous strength and stature.

The best character, indeed, were it not rather too perfect for

(1) Lord Chatham is said to have supported himself on his crutch while he was speaking. He was then sixty-nine years of age.

(2) Hume's philosophical, is distinguished from his historical, style—at least, in his earliest publications-by its more ambitious character. He rose, in his history, to simplicity, and has been much commended for the "careless inimitable graces -as Gibbon calls them-which he throws over his narrative.

"In narrative clearness, grace, and spirit, at least, it (the "History of England") is not excelled, scarcely equalled, by any other completed historical work in the language."-Craik, Eng. Lit. and Lang., ii. 356.