“Where the proud theatres disclose the scene,
Which interwoven Britons seem to raise,
And show the triumph which their shame displays.”

It is something wonderful, that the sagacity shown in the Declaration and the speech (and, so far as it goes, greater was never shown) should have failed to discover to the writer and to the speaker the inseparable relation between the parties to this transaction, and that nothing can be said to display the imperious arrogance of a base enemy which does not describe with equal force and equal truth the contemptible figure of an abject embassy to that imperious power.

It is no less striking, that the same obvious reflection should not occur to those gentlemen who conducted the opposition to government.  But their thoughts were turned another way.  They seem to have been so entirely occupied with the defence of the French Directory, so very eager in finding recriminatory; precedents to justify every act of its intolerable insolence, so animated in their accusations of ministry for not having at the very outset made concessions proportioned to the dignity of the great victorious power we had offended, that everything concerning the sacrifice in this business of national honor, and of the most fundamental principles in the policy of negotiation, seemed wholly to have escaped them.  To this fatal hour, the contention in Parliament appeared in another form, and was animated by another spirit.  For three hundred years and more, we have had wars with what stood as government in France.  In all that period, the language of ministers, whether of boast or of apology, was, that they had left nothing undone for the assertion of the national honor,—­the opposition, whether patriotically or factiously, contending that the ministers had been oblivious of the national glory, and had made improper sacrifices of that public interest which they were bound not only to preserve, but by all fair methods to augment.  This total change of tone on both sides of your House forms itself no inconsiderable revolution; and I am afraid it prognosticates others of still greater importance.  The ministers exhausted the stores of their eloquence in demonstrating that they had quitted the safe, beaten highway of treaty between independent powers,—­that, to pacify the enemy, they had made every sacrifice of the national dignity,—­and that they had offered to immolate at the same shrine the most valuable of the national acquisitions.  The opposition insisted that the victims were not fat nor fair enough to be offered on the altars of blasphemed Regicide; and it was inferred from thence, that the sacrifical ministers, (who were a sort of intruders in the worship of the new divinity,) in their schismatical devotion, had discovered more of hypocrisy than zeal.  They charged them with a concealed resolution to persevere in what these gentlemen have (in perfect consistency, indeed, with themselves, but most irreconcilably with fact and reason) called an unjust and impolitic war.