This piece is called “The Present State of the Nation.”  It may be considered as a sort of digest of the avowed maxims of a certain political school, the effects of whose doctrines and practices this country will fuel long and severely.  It is made up of a farrago of almost every topic which has been agitated on national affairs in parliamentary debate, or private conversation, for these last seven years.  The oldest controversies are hauled out of the dust with which time and neglect had covered them.  Arguments ten times repeated, a thousand times answered before, are here repeated again.  Public accounts formerly printed and reprinted revolve once more, and find their old station in this sober meridian.  All the commonplace lamentations upon the decay of trade, the increase of taxes, and the high price of labor and provisions, are here retailed again and again in the same tone with which they have drawled through columns of Gazetteers and Advertisers for a century together.  Paradoxes which affront common sense, and uninteresting barren truths which generate no conclusion, are thrown in to augment unwieldy bulk, without adding anything to weight.  Because two accusations are better than one, contradictions are set staring one another in the face, without even an attempt to reconcile them.  And, to give the whole a sort of portentous air of labor and information, the table of the House of Commons is swept into this grand reservoir of politics.

As to the composition, it bears a striking and whimsical resemblance to a funeral sermon, not only in the pathetic prayer with which it concludes, but in the style and tenor of the whole performance.  It is piteously doleful, nodding every now and then towards dulness; well stored with pious frauds, and, like most discourses of the sort, much better calculated for the private advantage of the preacher than the edification of the hearers.

The author has indeed so involved his subject, that it is frequently far from being easy to comprehend his meaning.  It is happy for the public that it is never difficult to fathom his design.  The apparent intention of this author is to draw the most aggravated, hideous and deformed picture of the state of this country, which his querulous eloquence, aided by the arbitrary dominion he assumes over fact, is capable of exhibiting.  Had he attributed our misfortunes to their true cause, the injudicious tampering of bold, improvident, and visionary ministers at one period, or to their supine negligence and traitorous dissensions at another, the complaint had been just, and might have been useful.  But far the greater and much the worst part of the state which he exhibits is owing, according to his representation, not to accidental and extrinsic mischiefs attendant on the nation, but to its radical weakness and constitutional distempers.  All this however is not without purpose.  The author is in hopes, that, when we are fallen into a fanatical terror for the national salvation, we shall