"That the House must perceive, from his coming forward to mark an expression or two of his best friend, how anxious he was to keep the distemper of France from the least countenance in England, where he was sure some wicked persons had shewn a strong disposition to recommend an imitation of the French spirit of reform. He was so strongly opposed to any the least tendency towards the means of introducing a democracy like theirs, as well as to the end itself, that much as it would afflict him, if such a thing could be attempted, and that any friend of his could concur in such measures (he was far, very far from believing they could) he would abandon his best friends, and join with his worst enemies to oppose either the means, or the end; and to resist all violent exertions of the spirit of innovation, so distant from all principles of true and safe reformation; a spirit well calculated to overturn states, but perfectly unfit to amend them.

"That he was no enemy to reformation, almost every business, in which he was much concerned, from the first day he sat in that House to that hour, was a business of reformation; and when he had not been employed in correcting, he had been employed in resisting abuses. Some traces of this spirit in him then stood on their statute book. In his opinion, any thing which unnecessarily tore to pieces the contexture of the state, not only prevented all real reformation, but introduced evils which would call (but perhaps call in vain) for new reformation.

"That he thought the French nation very unwise. What they valued themselves on, was a disgrace to them, They had gloried (and some people in England had thought fit to take share in that glory) in making a revolution, as if revolutions were good things in themselves. All the horrors

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horrors and all the crimes of the anarchy, which led to their revolution, which attend its progress, and which may virtually attend it in its establishment, pass for nothing with the lovers of revolutions. The French have made their way, through the destruction of their country, to a bad constitution, when they were absolutely in possession of a good one. They were in possession of it the day the states met in separate orders. Their business, had they been either virtuous, or wise, or had they been left to their own judgment, was to secure the stability and independence of the states, according to those orders, under the monarch on the throne. then their duty to redress grievances. Instead of redressing grievances, and improving the fabric of their state, to which they were called by their monarch, and sent by their country, they were made to take a very different course. They first destroyed all the balances and counterpoises which serve to fix the state, and to give it a steady direction; and which furnish sure correctives to any violent spirit which may prevail in any of the orders. These balances existed in their oldest constitution, and in the constitution of this country, and in the constitution of all the countries in Europe. These they rashly destroyed, and then they melted down the whole into one incongruous, ill-connected mass.

"When they had done this, they instantly, with the most atrocious perfidy and breach of all faith among men, laid the axe to the root of all property, and consequently of all national prosperity, by the principles they established, and the example they set, in confiscating all the possessions of the church. They made and recorded a sort of institution and digest of anarchy, called THE RIGHTS OF MAN, in such a pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys at school;

school; but this declaration of rights was worse than pedantic and trifling in them; as, by their name and authority, they systematically destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the minds of the people. By this mad declaration, they subverted the state, and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war, and perhaps, many such.

"With them the question was not between despotism and liberty. The sacrifice they made of the peace and power of their country, was not made on the altar of freedom. Freedom, and a better security for it than that they had taken, they might have had without any sacrifice at all. They brought themselves into all the calamities they suffer, not that through them they might obtain a British constitution; they plunged themselves headlong into those calamities, to prevent themselves from settling into that constitution, or into any thing resembling it.

"That if they should perfectly succeed in what they propose, as they are likely enough to do, and establish a democracy, or a mob of democracies, in a country circumstanced like France, they will establish a very bad government, a very bad species of tyranny.

"That the worst effect of all their proceedings was on their military, which was rendered an army for every purpose, but that of defence. That, if the question was, whether soldiers were to forget they were citizens, as an abstract proposition, he could have no difference about it; though, as it is usual, when abstract principles are to be applied, much was to be thought on the manner of uniting the character of citizen and soldier. But as applied to the events which had happened in France,

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where the abstract principle was cloathed with its cir cumstances, he thought that his friend would agree with him, that what was done there furnished no matter of exultation, either in the act or the example. These soldiers were not citizens, but base hireling mutineers, and mercenary sordid deserters, wholly destitute of any ho norable principle. Their conduct was one of the fruits of that anarchic spirit, from the evils of which a demo. cracy itself was to be resorted to by those who were the least disposed to that form, as a sort of refuge. It was not an army in corps and with discipline, and embodied under the respectable patriot citizens of the state in resisting tyranny. Nothing like it. It was the case of copi mon soldiers, deserting from their officers, to join a furious, licentious populace. It was a desertion to a cause, the real object of which was to level all those institutions, and to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents. parents. That this cause of theirs was not an enemy to servitude, but to society.

"He wished the House to consider, how the members would like to have their mansions pulled down and pillaged; their persons fabused, insulted, and destroyed; their title deeds brought out and burnt before their faces; and themselves and their families driven to seek refuge in every nation throughout Europe, for no other yeason than this, that without any fault of theirs, they were born gentlemen, and men of property, and were suspected of a desire to preserve their consideration and

their estates. The desertion in France was to aid an abominable sedition, the very professed principle of which was an implacable hostility to nobility and gentry, and whose savage war-whoop was "à l'Ariftocrate," by which senseless bloody cry they animated one another to rapine and murder; whilst abetted by ambitious men of another class, they were crushing every thing respectable and virtuous in their nation, and to their power disgracing almost every name, by which we formerly knew there was such a country in the world as France. He knew too well, and he felt as much as any man, how difficult it was to accommodate a standing army to a free constitution or to any constitution. An armed, disciplined body, is, in its essence, dangerous to liberty; undisciplined, it is ruinous to society. Its component parts are, in the latter case, neither good citizens, nor good soldiers. What have they thought of in France, under such a difficulty as almost puts the human faculties to a stand? They have put their army under such a variety of prin ciples of duty, that it is more likely to breed litigants, petty foggers, and mutineers, than soldiers. They have set up, to balance their crown army, another army, deriving under another authority, called a municipal army —a balance of armies, not of orders. These latter they have destroyed with every mark of insult and oppression. States may, and they will, best exist with a partition of civil powers. Armies cannot exist under a divided command. This state of things he thought, in effect, a state of war, or at best, but a truce instead of peace, in the country.

"What a dreadful thing is a standing army, for the conduct of the whole, or any part of which, no man is responsible. In the present state of the French crown army, is the crown responsible for the whole of it? Is

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