usual in cases of far less moment) call together any meeting of the Duke of Portland's friends in the house of commons, for the purpose of taking their opinion on the conduct to be pursued in parliament at that critical juncture. He concerted his measures (if with any persons at all) with the friends of Lord Lansdowne, and those calling themselves friends of the people, and others not in the smallest degree attached to the Duke of Portland; by which conduct he wilfully gave up (in my opinion) all pretensions to be considered as of that party, and much more to be considered as the leader and mouth of it in the house of commons. This could not give much encouragement to those who had been separated from Mr. Fox, on account of his conduct on the proclamation, to rejoin that party.

5. Not having consulted any of the Duke of Portland's party in the house of commons; and not having consulted them, because he had reason to know, that the course he had resolved to pursue would be highly disagreeable to them, he represented the alarm, which was a second time given and taken, in still more invidious colours than those in which he painted the alarms of the former year. He described those alarms in this manner, although the cause of them was then grown far less equivocal, and far more urgent. He even went so far as to treat the supposition of the growth of a jacobin spirit in England as a libel on the nation. As to the danger from abroad, on the first day of the session, he said little or nothing upon the subject. He contented himself with defending the ruling factions in France, and with accusing the public councils of this kingdom of every sort of evil design on the liberties of the people; declaring distinctly, strongly, and precisely, that the whole danger of the nation was from the growth of the power of the crown. The policy of this declaration was obvious. It was in subservience to the general plan of disabling us from taking any steps against France. To counteract the alarm given by the progress of jacobin arms and principles, he endeavoured to excite an opposite alarm concerning the growth of the power of the crown. If that alarm should prevail, he knew that the nation never would be brought by arms to oppose the growth of the jacobin empire; because it is obvious that war does, in its very nature, necessitate the commons considerably to strengthen the hands of government; and if that strength should itself be the object of terrour, we could have no war. 6. In the extraordinary and violent speeches of that day, he attributed all the evils which

the public had suffered, to the proclamation of the preceding summer; though he spoke in presence of the Duke of Portland's own son, the marquis of Tichfield, who had seconded the address on that proclamation; and in the presence of the Duke of Portland's brother, Lord Edward Bentinck, and several others of his best friends and nearest relations.

7. On that day, that is, on the 13th of December, 1792, he proposed an amendment to the address, which stands on the journals of the house, and which is, perhaps, the most extraordinary record which ever did stand upon them. To introduce this amendment, he not only struck out the part of the proposed address which alluded to insurrections, upon the ground of the objections which he took to the legality of calling together parliament, (objections which I must ever think litigious and sophistical,) but he likewise struck out that part which related to the cabals and conspiracies of the French faction in England, although their practices and correspondences were of public notoriety. Mr. Cooper and Mr. Watt has been deputed from Manchester to the jacobins. These ambassadors were received by them as British representatives. Other deputations of English had been received at the bar of the national assembly. They had gone the length of giving supplies to the jacobin armies; and they in return had received promises of military assistance to forward their designs in England. A regular correspondence for fraternizing the two nations had also been carried on by societies in London with a great number of the jacobin societies in France. This correspondence had also for its object the pretended improvement of the British constitution.What is the most remarkable, and by much the more mischievous part of his proceedings that day, Mr. Fox likewise struck out every thing in the address which related to the tokens of ambition given by France, her aggressions upon our allies, and the sudden and dangerous growth of her power upon every side; and instead of all those weighty, and at that time, necessary matters, by which the house of commons was (in a crisis, such as perhaps Europe never stood) to give assurances to our allies, strength to our government, and a check to the common enemy of Europe, he substituted nothing but a criminal charge on the conduct of the British government for calling parliament together, and an engagement to inquire into that conduct.

8. If it had pleased God to suffer him to succeed in this his project, for the amendment to the address, he would forever have

ruined this nation, along with the rest of Europe. At home all the jacobin societies, formed for the utter destruction of our constitution, would have lifted up their heads, which had been beaten down by the two proclamations. Those societies would have been infinitely strengthened and multiplied in every quarter; their dangerous foreign communications would have been left broad and open; the crown would not have been authorized to take any measure whatever for our immediate defence by sea or land. The closest, the most natural, the nearest, and, at the same time, from many internal as well as external circumstances, the weakest of our allies, Holland, would have been given up, bound hand and foot, to France, just on the point of invading that republic. A general consternation would have seized upon all Europe; and all alliance with every other power, except France, would have been forever rendered impracticable to us. I think it impossible for any man, who regards the dignity and safety of his country, or indeed the common safety of mankind, ever to forget Mr. Fox's proceedings in that tremendous crisis of all human affairs.

9. Mr. Fox very soon had reason to be apprized of the general dislike of the Duke of Portland's friends to this conduct. Some of those who had even voted with him, the day after their vote expressed their abhorrence of his amendment, their sense of its inevitable tendency, and their total alienation from the principles and maxims upon which it was made; yet, the very next day, that is, on Friday the 14th of December, he brought on what in effect was the very same business, and on the same principles, a second time.

10. Although the house does not usually sit on Saturday, he a third time brought on another proposition, in the same spirit, and pursued it with so much heat and perseverance, as to sit into Sunday; a thing not known in parliament for many years.

11. In all these motions and debates he wholly departed from all the political principles relative to France, (considered merely as a state, and independent of its jacobin form of government) which had hitherto been held fundamental in this country, and which he had himself held more strongly than any man in parliament. He at that time studiously separated himself from those to whose sentiments he used to profess no small regard, although those sentiments were publicly declared. I had then no concern in the party, having been for some time, with all outrage,

excluded from it; but, on general principles, I must say, that a person who assumes to be leader of a party composed of freemen and of gentlemen, ought to pay some degree of deference to their feelings, and even to their prejudices. He ought to have some degree of management for their credit and influence of their country. He shewed so very little of this delicacy, that he compared the alarm raised in the minds of the Duke of Portland's party, (which was his own) an alarm in which they sympathized with the greater part of the nation, to the panic produced by the pretended popish plot in the reign of Charles the Second-describing it to be, as that was, a contrivance of knaves, and believed only by well-meaning dupes and madmen.

12. The Monday following, (the 17th of December) he pursued the same conduct.— The means used in England to co-operate with the jacobin army in politics, agreed with their modes of proceeding; I allude to the mischievous writings circulated with much industry and success, as well as the seditious clubs, which at that time, added not a little to the alarm taken by observing and well-informed men. The writings and the clubs were two evils which marched together. Mr. Fox discovered the greatest possible disposition to favor and countenance the one as well as the other of these two grand instruments of the French system. He would hardly consider any political writing whatsoever, as a libel, or as a fit object of prosecution. At a time in which the press has been the grand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion, and I may say of human society itself, to carry the doctrines of its liberty higher than ever it has been known by its most extravagant assertors even in France, gave occasion to very serious reflections.Mr. Fox treated the associations for prosecuting these libels, as tending to prevent the improvement of the human mind, and as a mobbish tyranny. He thought proper to compare them with the riotous assemblies of Lord George Gordon in 1780, declaring that he had advised his friends in Westminster to sign the associations whether they agreed to them or not, in order that they might avoid destruction to their persons or their houses, or a desertion of their shops. This insidious advice tended to confound those who wished well to the object of the association, with the seditious, against whom the association was directed. By this stratagem, the confederacy intended for preserving the British constitution, and the public peace, would be wholly

defeated. The magistrates, utterly incapable of distinguishing the friends from the enemies of order, would in vain look for support when they stood in the greatest need of it.

13. Mr. Fox's whole conduct, on this occasion, was without example. The very morning after these violent declamations, in the house of commons against the association, (that is, on Tuesday the 18th) he went himself to a meeting of St. George's parish, and there signed an association of the nature and tendency of those he had the night before so vehemently condemned; and several of his particular and most intimate friends, inhabitants of that parish, attended and signed along with him.

14. Immediately after this extraordinary step, and in order perfectly to defeat the ends of that association against jacobin publications, (which, contrary to his opinions, he had promoted and signed) a mischievous society was formed under his auspices, called, the Friends of the liberty of the press. Their title groundlessly insinuated, that the freedom of the press had lately suffered, or was now threatened with some violation. This society was only, in reality, another modification of the society calling itself the Friends of the People, which, in the preceding summer had caused so much uneasiness in the Duke of Portland's mind, and in the minds of several of his friends. This new society was composed of many, if not most of the members of the club of the Friends of the People, with the addition of a vast multitude of others, (such as Mr. Horne Tooke) of the worst and most seditious dispositions that could be found in the whole kingdom. In the first meeting of this club, Mr. Erskine took the lead, and directly (without any disavowal ever since on Mr. Fox's part) made use of his name and authority in favour of its formation and purposes. In the same meeting Mr. Erskine had thanks for his defence of Paine, which amounted to a complete avowal of that jacobin incendiary; else it is impossible to know how Mr. Erskine should have deserved such marked applauses for acting merely as a lawyer for his fee, in the ordinary course of his profession.

15. Indeed Mr. Fox appeared the general patron of all such persons and proceedings. When Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and other persons, for practices of the most dangerous kind, in Paris and in London, were removed from the king's guards, Mr. Fox took occasion, in the house of commons, heavily to censure that act as unjust and oppressive, and

tending to make officers bad citizens. There were few, however, who did not call for some such measures on the part of government, as of absolute necessity for the king's personal safety, as well as that of the public; and nothing but the mistaken lenity (with which such practices were rather discountenanced than punished) could possibly deserve reprehension in what was done with regard to those gentle

men.

16. Mr. Fox, regularly and systematically, and with a diligence long unusual to him, did every thing he could to countenance the same principle of fraternity and connection with the jacobins abroad, and the national convention of France, for which these officers had been removed from the Guards. For when a bill (feeble and lax indeed, and far short of the vigour required by the conjuncture) was brought in for removing out of the kingdom, the emissaries of France, Mr. Fox opposed it with all his might. He pursued a vehement and detailed opposition to it, through all its stages, describing it as a measure contrary to the existing treaties between Great Britain and France; as a violation of the law of nations, and as an outrage on the great charter itself.

17. In the same manner, and with the same heat, he opposed a bill, which, (though awkward and inartificial in its construction) was right and wise in its principle, and was precedented in the best times, and absolutely necessary at that juncture,-I mean the Traitorous Correspondence Bill. By these means the enemy, rendered infinitely dangerous by the links of real faction and pretended commerce, would have been (had Mr. Fox succeeded,) enabled to carry on the war against us by our own resources. For this purpose that enemy would have had his agents and traitors in the midst of us.

18. When at length war was actually declared, by the usurpers in France, against this kingdom, and declared whilst they were pretending a negotiation through Dumourier with Lord Auckland, Mr. Fox still continued, through the whole of the proceedings, to discredit the national honour and justice, and to throw the entire blame of the war on parliament, and on his own country, as acting with violence, haughtiness, and want of equity. He frequently asserted, both at the time and ever since, that the war, though declared by France, was provoked by us, and that it was wholly unnecessary, and fundamentally unjust.

19. He has lost no opportunity of railing, in the most virulent manner, and in the most

unmeasured language, at every foreign power with whom we could now, or at any time, contract any useful or effectual alliance against France, declaring that he hoped no alliance with those powers was made, or was in a train of being made.* He always expressed himself with the utmost horrour concerning such alliances, so did all his phalanx. Mr. Sheridan in particular, after one of his invectives against those powers, sitting by him, said, with manifest marks of his approbation, that if we must go to war, he had rather go to war alone than with such allies.

20. Immediately after the French declaration of war against us, parliament addressed the king in support of the war against them, as just and necessary, and provoked as well as formerly declared against Great Britain. He did not divide the house upon this measure; yet he immediately followed this our solemn parliamentary engagement to the king, with a motion proposing a set of resolutions, the effect of which was, that the two houses were to load themselves with every kind of reproach for having made the address, which they had just carried to the throne. He commenced this long string of criminatory resolutions against his country, (if king, lords and commons of Great Britain, and a decided majority without doors are his country) with a declaration against intermeddling in the interiour concerns of France. The purport of this resolution of non-interference, is a thing unexampled in the history of the world, when one nation has been actually at war with another. The best writers on the law of nations, give no sort of countenance to this doctrine of non-interference, in the extent and manner in which he used it, even when there is no war. When the war exists, not one authority is against it in all its latitude. His doctrine is equally contrary to the enemy's uniform practice, who, whether in peace or in war, makes his great aim not only to change the government, but to make an entire revolution in the whole of the social order in every country.

The object of the last of this extraordinary string of resolutions moved by Mr. Fox, was to advise the crown not to enter into such an engagement with any foreign power, so as to hinder us from making a separate peace with France, or which might tend to enable any of powers to introduce a government in that country, other than such as those persons whom he calls the people of France, shall choose to

those

* It is an exception, that in one of his last speeches, (but not before) Mr. Fox seemed to think an alliance with Spain might be proper. VOL. II.-10

establish. In short, the whole of these resolutions appeared to have but one drift-namely, the sacrifice of our own domestic dignity and safety, and the independency of Europe, to the support of this strange mixture of anarchy and tyranny which prevails in France, and which Mr. Fox and his party were pleased to call a government. The immediate consequences of these measures was (by an example, the ill effects of which, on the whole world, are not to be calculated) to secure the robbers of the innocent nobility, gentry, and ecclesiastics of France, in the enjoyment of the spoil they have made of the estates, houses, and goods of their fellow-citizens.

21. Not satisfied with moving these resolutions, tending to confirm this horrible tyranny and robbery, and with actually dividing the house on the first of the long string which they composed, in a few days afterwards he encouraged and supported Mr. Grey in producing the very same string in a new form, and in moving under the shape of an address of parliament to the crown, another virulent libel on all its own proceedings in this session, in which not only all the ground of the resolutions was again travelled over, but much new inflammatory matter was introduced. In particular, a charge was made that Great Britain had not interposed to prevent the last partition of Poland. On this head the party dwelt very largely, and very vehemently. Mr. Fox's intention, in the choice of this extraordinary topic, was evident enough. He well knows two things; first, that no wise or honest man can approve of that partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all countries at some future time. Secondly, he knows quite as well, that, let our opinions on that partition be what they will, England, by itself, is not in a situation to afford to Poland any assistance whatsoever. The purpose of the introduction of Polish politics into this discussion, was not for the sake of Poland; it was to throw an odium upon those who are obliged to decline the cause of justice from their impossibility of supporting a cause which they approve; as if we, who think more strongly on this subject than he does, were of a party against Poland, because we are obliged to act with some of the authors of that injustice, against our common enemy, France. But the great and leading purpose of this introduction of Poland into the debates on the French war, was to divert the public attention from what was in our power, that is, from a steady cooperation against France, to a quarrel with the allies for the sake of a Polish war, which, for

any useful purpose to Poland, he knew it was out of our power to make. If England can touch Poland ever so remotely, it must be through the medium of alliances. But by attacking all the combined powers together for their supposed unjust aggression upon France, he bound them by a new common interest, not separately to join England for the rescue of Poland. The proposition could only mean to do what all the writers of his party in the Morning Chronicle have aimed at persuading the public to, through the whole of the last autumn and winter, and to this hour; that is, to an alliance with the jacobins of France, for the pretended purpose of succouring Poland. This curious project would leave to Great Britain no other ally in all Europe, except its old enemy, France.

22. Mr. Fox, after the first day's discussion on the question for the address, was at length driven to admit-(to admit rather than to urge, and that very faintly,) that France had discovered ambitious views, which none of his partisans, that I recollect, (Mr. Sheridan excepted,) did, however, either urge or admit. What is remarkable enough, all the points admitted against the jacobins, were brought to bear in their favour as much as those in which they were defended. For when Mr. Fox admitted that the conduct of the jacobins did aiscover ambition, he always ended his admission of their ambitious views by an apology for them, insisting, that the universally hostile disposition shewn to them, rendered their ambition a sort of defensive policy. Thus, on whatever roads he travelled, they all terminated in recommending a recognition of their pretended republic, and in the plan of sending an ambassador to it. This was the burthen of all his song "Every thing which we could reasonably hope from war, would be obtained from treaty." It is to be observed, however, that in all these debates, Mr. Fox never once stated to the house upon what ground it was he conceived, that all the objects of the French system of united fanaticism and ambition would instantly be given up whenever England should think fit to propose a treaty. On proposing so strange a recognition, and so humiliating an embassy as he moved, he was bound to produce his authority, if any authority he had. He ought to have done this the rather, because Le Brun, in his first propositions, and in his answers by lord Grenville, defended, on principle, not on temporary convenience, every thing which was objected to France, and shewed not the smallest disposition to give up any one of the points of discussion. Mr. Fox must

also have known, that the convention had passed to the order of the day, on a proposition to give some sort of explanation or modification to the hostile decree of the 19th of November, for exciting insurrections in all countries; a decree known to be peculiarly pointed at Great Britain. The whole proceeding of the French administration was the most remote that could be imagined from furnishing any indication of a pacific disposition: for at the very time in which it was pretended that the jacobins entertained those boasted pacific intentions, at the very time in which Mr. Fox was urging a treaty with them, not content with refusing a modification of the decree for insurrections, they published their ever memorable decree of the 15th of December, 1792, for disorganizing every country in Europe, into which they should on any occasion set their foot; and on the 25th and the 30th of the same month, they solemnly, and on the last of these days, practically confirmed that decree.

23. But Mr. Fox had himself taken good care in the negotiation he proposed, that France should not be obliged to make any very great concessions to her presumed moderation

for he had laid down one general comprehensive rule, with him (as he said) constant and inviolable. This rule, in fact, would not only have left to the faction in France, all the property and power they had usurped at home but most, if not all, of the conquests which by their atrocious perfidy and violence, they had made abroad. The principle laid down by Mr. Fox, is this, "That every state, in the conclusion of a war, has a right to avail itself of its conquests towards an indemnification.” This principle (true or false) is totally contrary to the policy which this country has pursued with France, at various periods, particularly at the treaty of Ryswick, in the last century, and at the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in this. Whatever the merits of his rule may be, in the eyes of neutral judges, it is a rule which no statesman before him ever laid down in favour of the adverse power with whom he was to negotiate. The adverse party himself, may safely be trusted to take care of his own aggrandisement. But (as if the black boxes of the several parties had been exchanged) Mr. Fox's English ambassador, by some odd mistake, would find himself charged with the concerns of France. If we were to leave France as she stood at the time when Mr. Fox proposed to treat with her, that formidable power must have been infinitely strengthened, and almost every other power in Europe as much weakened, by the extraordinary basis