diversified and complicated works. The accumulation of capital must usually be the effect of parsimony and frugality, of vigilance and care, continued for a length of years. But this disposition can never be at all general among any people, or receive any thing like an adequate encouragement, except where the genius of liberty presides, shewing its beneficent operations in the institution of equal laws, and in the pure and upright judicial administration of the country. Liberty is the tutelary divinity of commerce. Men will not sow where they never expect to reap; nor labour for that which they are never likely to enjoy. The maxim in despotic states is, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we may be robbed of what we have by the capricious tyranny of the government. Thus a lavish expenditure or squalid wretchedness are the usual characteristics of despotic nations. Individuals are prodigal because they cannot look forward with any thing like certainty to the chance of enjoying the fruits of a provident accumulation; they are too much absorbed in the present; to make any provision for the future; no one willingly labours for the fruition of his most inveterate enemy. Where liberty flourishes property is secure. Each person is led to contemplate his own interest, not only in relation to the present day, but to years that are yet to come; he calculates not merely the present, but the future gains and pleasures of his exertions; a potent stimulus is applied to every species of industry; vigilance, economy, and a prospective parsimony, are forcibly excited. Thus capital is rapidly accumulated; and wealth is collected into masses by which the most salutary effects are produced; by which the arts are cherished and agriculture improved: by which the comforts and conveniences, the embellishments and refinements of civilized life,are made every where to abound. The commercial spirit is an enterprising spirit; but what so forcibly appals or so thoroughly annihilates the spirit of enterprise, as the ghastly spectre of an overwhelming despotism, menacing every moment the loss of property or life, causing every generous sentiment to vanish, every patriotic feeling to expire? The day which makes man a slave, takes half and more than half his worth away. There is something in tyranny, which makes its victims soon dwindle into all that is dwarfish and contemptible in mind and heart; it withers the nobler energies of the soul, and unfits the frame of man for those exertions which contribute most to the improvement and the happiness of social life. It is the smiling aspect of civil liberty which diffuses life and joy whereever its influence is felt, which animates all the exertions of

man by the feeling of security, and facilitates the acquisition of property and the accumulation of capital by the certainty of enjoyment.

If France wishesfor the aggrandizement of commerce, which humanity would always prefer to that of arms, she must adopt a system of government which shall evince an inviolate respect for the rights of property; which shall inspire confidence in the rich, and encourage exertion in the poor. All forced loans, all violent exactions, all capricious and arbitrary taxes must cease; and every bosom in the state must be made to taste the sweet feeling of security. If Bonaparte be ambitious of commerce, if he desire to have his towns peopled with merchants, and his ports resound with the busy hum of trade, he must be contented to set limits to his own power, and throw away the sceptre of despotic sway. He must institute a house of commons, which if not a perfect, shall at least be a virtual representation of the people, so that not his will but the will of the people, speaking in the voice of their representatives, shall be the basis of the law and the 'rule of taxation.

Commerce has flourished in Britain more than in any other country, chiefly on account of the greater degree of civil liberty which we have enjoyed; and of which no other nation ever appears to have had, for so long a continuance, so large a share. Civil liberty is the talisman, which makes commerce flourish; and it would be happy for France, and for the world, if Bonaparte would have recourse to this safe and efficacious charm, which would soon fill his towns with manufactures, and his ports with ships. In Britain, heavy as are the taxes, they are not partially distributed. They fall, as far as possible, equally on all in proportion to their means. No individual whatever can have his property wrested from him by the arbitrary will of another. There is no will in the country paramount to the law. However large the proportion of taxes which each person pays out of his property, each is conscious that he shall enjoy the remainder in security. He knows that it cannot be taken from him without his own consent, or, what is the same, that of his representative in parliament. His spirit of enterprise therefore is not damped; nor are the exertions of his frugality repressed. His industry is ardent, and his capital continually increased. Hence public credit,which is itself one of the fair progeny of a well-regulated government, over which the tutelary genius of civil liberty presides, flourishes in Britain with a fullness of expansion and a sublimity of growth unknown in any other age or any other country. Public credit does

not denote only the presence of wealth, it also indicates the prevalence of moral honesty among the people. Moral honesty has for a long course of years eminently distinguished all the commercial transactions of this country; and where the operations of commerce are not sanctified by the presence of moral honesty, they are nothing but complicated fraud. Before France can become a great commercial people, not only her political institutions but her moral habits must undergo a considerable alteration. There must be a change for the better in the genius of her government, and the manners of her people. A greater portion of freedom must be incorporated with the one, and virtue with the other.

Bonaparte is wrong in supposing that he could make France rich by making England poor. By the plunder of Great Britain he might indeed pour a temporary and fugitive stock of wealth into France; but it would, in some measure, be like cutting down the tree to get at the fruit. As far as our manufactures find their way into France, they must tend to excite the industry of France; for as far as they are objects of desire, they must operate as stimuli to exertion. Commerce is an exchange of equivalents, and the equivalent which France gives for English merchandize, in whatever it may consist, must be the product of toil. If all commerce were at this moment to be banished from England, it would not take refuge in France, any more than a dove would seek protection under the wings of a hawk. Commerce will not migrate to a region where all the moral virtues are despised, and where nothing but injustice and oppression are to be found. From every view which we can take of the subject, it appears to us, in opposition to the vapid declamation and impotent invective of M. Monbrion, to be at this moment the interest of all nations, instead of confederating with France against England, to confederate with England against France. For it is England which tends to enrich, and France to impoverish the world. The political propensities of England are naturally pacific, because they are commercial; those of France, which are almost entirely military, are naturally directed to war and ravage, to schemes of conquest and desolation. The prosperity of France is founded on the ruin of nations; it is watered only with tears and blood: while the prosperity of England, the fruit of virtue and of toil, overflows to every country with whom she trades, and her ships excite the salutary activity of every people whose shores they frequent. The prosperity of France generates nothing but evil, the prosperity of England dif fuses universal good. England at this moment may be regarded as the great workshop of the world; and it is a

workshop in which articles of pleasure or utility are prepared for every people under heaven. Her produce and her manufactures are not indeed gratuitously bestowed; but they are given in exchange for commodities, of which other nations have a superfluity; and surely every nation is benefited which parts with something which it does not want for something which it does, which multiplies its pleasures by bartering that which, if retained, could make no accession to its own felicity. Nothing tends to improve the disposition and manners of individuals more than a benignant social intercourse with their neighbours; the remark may be applied to nations. Trade, which multiplies the objects of desire, and the means of enjoyment; which allays national antipathies, and generates the mild feeling of philanthropy, tends to refine and civilize, to increase knowledge, and to redouble industry. The Romans are said to have promoted civilization by conquests; but the benefit, allowing it to be real, was purchased by ravage and by blood. But Britain enlarges the boundaries of civilization by means more agreeable to reason and more genial to humanity.. She prometes civilization by the works of industry and art, by furnishing numerous excitements to the ingenuity of man; and while she rouses the inquisitive faculties of the mind, she does not fail in exercising the more tender sensibilities of the heart. Every bale of goods or package of manufactures which she sends abroad, is something which tends to wean men more and more from the coarse habits of savage life: and though there may be some austere persons who inveigh against delicacy and refinement; yet it is certain that it is delicacy and refinement which add to the charms, to the interest, and the loveliness of the softer sex; and infuse a greater degree of gentleness, of benignity and sweetness, into the social establishments of men.

We trust that the foregoing observations will be an ample refutation of all the calumnies which it is the object of M. Monbrion's work to propagate among foreign nations to the prejudice of our own. Before we conclude, we will say a few words on the commerce with neutrals, as that is a subject in which the dearest interests of this country are involved; and as M. Monbrion would willingly make his readers believe that the conduct of Great Britain towards neutral powers is nothing but a tissue of the most glaring cruelty and injustice. That particular acts of oppression may have been committed by individuals on the seas, we do not pretend to deny; but oppression is not the characteristic of the English government; and we trust that all particular acts of injustice and oppression towards any neutral power have

been and always will be speedily redressed. The important question is, whether the commerce with neutrals should be subject to any restrictions at all, and if to any, what those restrictions should be. Now if an unrestrained commerce be allowed between neutrals and belligerents, that commerce must necessarily prove most disadvantageous to the party which is most powerful at sea: and can we expect that that belligerent which possesses a superior marine, souid quietly suffer that superiority to be rendered useless, or should patiently permit its enemy to derive greater advantages from an inferior force than it does from a superior? For instance, if one of the belligerents which has the smallest naval force should possess some colonial produce, of which it does not choose to risque the transport in its own ships for fear of capture by the superior fleets of its antagonists, ought neutral vessels to be suffered to convey this produce without any molestation, and thus carry on the commerce of the belligerent with little danger of loss? For at this rate France, or the belligerent possessing the smallest naval force, might turn all merchantmen into ships of war to cruize against the commerce of her rival; while England, or the nation possessing the superior marine, not carrying home the produce of her island in neutral vessels but in her own ships, would have that produce continually exposed to be captured by the enemy, at the very time when the trade and property of that enemy were protected by the neutral ships in which they were conveyed. But, as far as war has any thing to do with equi ty or justice, would this be either equitable or just? Would it not be a concession on the part of a superior naval power, which it could not make without rendering its maritime superiority of no avail? It may be said that England might permit her trade to be carried on by neutrals as well as France; but this again would be for England to abandon the greatness and glory of her marine, only to promote the ambi tious views of her most inveterate foe. Conscious of her inferiority at sea, France wishes to make up for the inferiority of her force by the subtlety of her policy. She wishes to secure her own trade from capture, while she commits every possible depredation on that of her antagonist. Thus she clamours for the rights of neutrals and the freedom of the seas. But she has neither reason nor justice to support her claim. There is an old maxim which may be referred to the conduct of nations as well as individuals: Do as you would be done by. Now for a moment let us suppose that the maritime force of France was as superior to that of England as the maritime force of England is at present to that of France. Would France in these circumstances permit neutral pow