To illustrate my opinions on this subject, let us suppose a case, which, after what has happened, we cannot think absolutely impossible, though the augury is to be abominated, and the event deprecated with our most ardent prayers.  Let us suppose, then, that our gracious sovereign was sacrilegiously murdered; his exemplary queen, at the head of the matronage of this land, murdered in the same manner; that those princesses whose beauty and modest elegance are the ornaments of the country, and who are the leaders and patterns of the ingenuous youth of their sex, were put to a cruel and ignominious death, with hundreds of others, mothers and daughters, ladies of the first distinction; that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, princes the hope and pride of the nation, with all their brethren, were forced to fly from the knives of assassins; that the whole body of our excellent clergy were either massacred or robbed of all and transported; the Christian religion, in all its denominations, forbidden and persecuted; the law totally, fundamentally, and in all its parts, destroyed; the judges put to death by revolutionary tribunals; the peers and commons robbed to the last acre of their estates, massacred, if they stayed, or obliged to seek life in flight, in exile, and in beggary; that the whole landed property should share the very same fate; that every military and naval officer of honor and rank, almost to a man, should be placed in the same description of confiscation and exile; that the principal merchants and bankers should be drawn out, as from an hen-coop, for slaughter; that the citizens of our greatest and most flourishing cities, when the hand and the machinery of the hangman were not found sufficient, should have been collected in the public squares and massacred by thousands with cannon; if three hundred thousand others should have been doomed to a situation worse than death in noisome and pestilential prisons.  In such a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?  Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired, honored, loved, and cherished?  Would not the exiles of England alone be my government and my fellow-citizens?  Would not their places of refuge be my temporary country?  Would not all my duties and all my affections be there, and there only?  Should I consider myself as a traitor to my country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them on their enemies?  Could I in any way show myself more a patriot?  What should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering brethren,—­who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants,—­and could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?  What ought I to think and feel, if, being geographers instead of kings, they recognized the desolated cities, the wasted fields, and the rivers polluted with blood, of this geometrical measurement,