of fraternity in the room of that salutary prejudice called our country,—­it is, I say, but too easy to persuade them, agreeably to what Mr. Fox hints in his public letter, that this war is, and that the other wars have been, the wars of kings; it is easy to persuade them that the terrors even of a foreign conquest are not terrors for them; it is easy to persuade them, that, for their part, they have nothing to lose,—­and that their condition is not likely to be altered for the worse, whatever party may happen to prevail in the war.  Under any circumstances this doctrine is highly dangerous, as it tends to make separate parties of the higher and lower orders, and to put their interests on a different bottom.  But if the enemy you have to deal with should appear, as France now appears, under the very name and title of the deliverer of the poor and the chastiser of the rich, the former class would readily become not an indifferent spectator of the war, but would be ready to enlist in the faction of the enemy,—­which they would consider, though under a foreign name, to be more connected with them than an adverse description in the same land.  All the props of society would be drawn from us by these doctrines, and the very foundations of the public defence would give way in an instant.

36.  There is no point which the faction of fraternity in England have labored more than to excite in the poor the horror of any war with France upon any occasion.  When they found that their open attacks upon our Constitution in favor of a French republic were for the present repelled, they put that matter out of sight, and have taken up the more plausible and popular ground of general peace, upon merely general principles; although these very men, in the correspondence of their clubs with those of France, had reprobated the neutrality which now they so earnestly press.  But, in reality, their maxim was, and is, “Peace and alliance with France, and war with the rest of the world.”

37.  This last motion of Mr. Fox bound up the whole of his politics during the session.  This motion had many circumstances, particularly in the Norwich correspondence, by which the mischief of all the others was aggravated beyond measure.  Yet this last motion, far the worst of Mr. Fox’s proceedings, was the best supported of any of them, except his amendment to the address.  The Duke of Portland had directly engaged to support the war;—­here was a motion as directly made to force the crown to put an end to it before a blow had been struck.  The efforts of the faction have so prevailed that some of his Grace’s nearest friends have actually voted for that motion; some, after showing themselves, went away; others did not appear at all.  So it must be, where a man is for any time supported from personal considerations, without reference to his public conduct.  Through the whole of this business, the spirit of fraternity appears to me to have been the governing principle.  It might be shameful