peace, sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose,-by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country,-to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other, in the same act, and by the bond of the very same interest, which reconciles them to British government.

I mean to give peace. Peace implies reconciliation; and, where there has been a material dispute, reconciliation does, in a manner, imply concession on the one part or the other. In this state of things, I make no difficulty in affirming that the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace with honour and safety. Such an offer from such a power will be attributed to magnanimity. But the concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear. When such a one is disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior; and he loses for ever that time, and those chances, which, as they happen to all men, are the strength and resources of all inferior power.

My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, yet are as strong as the links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,-they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood, that your government may be one thing, and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened; and every thing hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, as the sacred Temple consecrated to our common faith; wherever that chosen race-the sons of England-worship Freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends will you have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is

the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true Act of Navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the colonies; and, through them, secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which made originally, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your registers, and your bonds, your affidavits, and your sufferances, form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives to them their life and efficacy. It is the spirit of the English Constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the landtax act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely, no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy; and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical, to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists, but what is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But, to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling principles-which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence-are, in truth, everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom and a great empire, and little minds, go together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with a zeal of filling our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on America, with the old warning of the Church, Sursum Corda! We ought

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to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust, to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.

VIII.-MR. CANNING, ON THE SLAVE TRADE.

I HAVE, already, had occasion to say something of the anti quity of the Slave Trade, in apology for the want of novelty and of variety, in the arguments which I might have to bring against it. Those arguments, I have admitted, could not but be old; I have admitted, they must necessarily be always the same; because they were founded on what was eternal Truth; because they were allied to what was immutable Justice; and they partook of the immortality of the one, and of the unchangeableness of the other. But little, indeed, did I expect to hear the remote origin and long duration of the Slave Trade brought forward with triumph; to hear the advocates of the Slave Trade put in their claim for the venerableness of age, and the sacredness of prescription. What are the principles upon which we allow a certain claim to our respect, to belong to any institution which has subsisted from remote times? What is the reason why, when any such institutions had, by the change of circumstances, or of manners, become useless, we still tolerated them; nay, cherished them, with something of affectionate regard; and, even when they became burdensome, did not remove them without regret? What, but because, in such institutions, for the most part, we saw the shadow of departed worth or usefulness; the monument and memorial of what had, in its origin, or during its vigour, been of service or credit to mankind. Was this the case with the Slave Trade? Was the Slave Trade originally begun upon some principle of public justice or national honour, which the lapse of time, which the mutations of the world, have alone impaired and done away? Has it to plead former merits, services, and glories, in behalf of its present foulness and disgrace? Was its infancy lovely, or its manhood useful, though, in its age, it is become thus loathsome and perverse? No; its infant lips were stained with blood. Its whole existence has been a series of rapacity, cruelty, and murder. It rests with the House to decide,

whether it will allow, to such a life, the honours of old age, or endeavour to extend its duration. What are the grounds on which the plea of prescription usually rests? And in what cases is it, where any existing order of things, though violent and unjust in its original institution, had, by lapse of time, been so meliorated and softened down, and reconciled to the feelings of mankind-had so accommodated itself to the manners and prejudices, and interwoven itself with the habits of a country,-that the remembrance of its original usurpation was lost, in the experience of present harmlessness or utility? Conquest was often of this nature. Violent and unjustifiable in its introduction, it often happened that the conquerors and the conquered became blended into one people, and that a system of common interest arose out of the conciliated differences of parties, originally hostile. But, was this the case with the Slave Trade? Was it in its outset only, that it had anything of violence, of injustice, or of oppression ?—Are the wounds which Africa felt in the first conflict, healed and skinned over? Or, are they fresh and green, as at the moment when the first slave-ship began its ravages upon the coast? Are the oppressors and the oppressed so reconciled to each other, that no trace of enmity remains? Or, is it in reason, or in common sense, to claim a prescriptive right,not to the fruits of an ancient and forgotten crime, committed long ago, and traceable only in its consequences-but to a series of new violences, to a chain of fresh enormities, to cruelties-continued-repeated; and of which every individual instance inflicted a fresh calamity, and constituted a fresh, a separate, and substantive crime? Certainly not;and I cannot conceive, that, in refusing to sanction the continuance of such a system, the House will feel itself, in the smallest degree, impairing the respect due to the establishments of antiquity, or shaking the foundations of the British Constitution.

IX.-MR. SHERIDAN'S INVECTIVE AGAINST MR. HASTINGS.

HAD a stranger, at this time, gone into the province of Oude, ignorant of what had happened since the death of Sujah Dowla-that man who, with a savage heart, had still great lines of character; and who, with all his ferocity in war, had still, with a cultivating hand, preserved to his country the riches which it derived from benignant skies and a prolific soil;-if this stranger, ignorant of all that had happened in the short

interval, and observing the wide and general devastation, and all the horrors of the scene-of plains unclothed and brownof vegetables burned up and extinguished-of villages depopulated and in ruins of temples unroofed and perishing-of reservoirs broken down and dry;—he would naturally inquire, What war has thus laid waste the fertile fields of this once beautiful and opulent country?-what civil dissensions have happened, thus to tear asunder and separate the happy societies that once possessed these villages?-what disputed succession, what religious rage, has, with unholy violence, demolished those temples, and disturbed fervent, but unobtruding piety, in the exercise of its duties?-what merciless enemy has thus spread the horrors of fire and sword?—what severe visitation of Providence has dried up the fountain, and taken from the face of the earth every vestige of verdure?— Or, rather, what monsters have stalked over the country, tainting and poisoning, with pestiferous breath, what the voracious appetite could not devour?

To such questions, what must be the answer? No wars have ravaged these lands, and depopulated these villages-no civil discords have been felt-no disputed succession-no religious rage-no merciless enemy-no affliction of Provi dence, which, while it scourged for the moment, cut off the sources of resuscitation-no voracious and poisoning monsters;—no!—all this has been accomplished by the friendship, generosity, and kindness of the English nation. They have embraced us with their protecting arms, and, lo!--those are the fruits of their alliance. What, then! shall we be told, that, under such circumstances, the exasperated feelings of a whole people, thus goaded and spurred on to clamour and resistance, were excited by the poor and feeble influence of the Begums? When we hear the description of the feverparoxysm-delirium, into which despair had thrown the natives, when, on the banks of the polluted Ganges, panting for death, they tore more widely open the lips of their gaping wounds to accelerate their dissolution; and, while their blood was issuing, presented their ghastly eyes to heaven,-breathing their last and fervent prayer, that the dry earth might not be suffered to drink their blood, but that it might rise up to the throne of God, and rouse the eternal Providence to avenge the wrongs of their country: --Will it be said that this was brought about by the incantations of those Begums, in their secluded Zenana? or that they could inspire this enthusiasm and this despair, into the breasts of à people who