Except with the addition of the unheard-of insult offered to our ambassador by his rude expulsion, we are never to forget that the point on which the negotiation with De la Croix broke off was exactly that which had stifled in its cradle the negotiation we had attempted with Barthelemy.  Each of these transactions concluded with a manifesto upon our part; but the last of our manifestoes very materially differed from the first.  The first Declaration stated, that “nothing was left but to prosecute a war equally just and necessary.”  In the second the justice and necessity of the war is dropped:  the sentence importing that nothing was left but the prosecution of such a war disappears also.  Instead of this resolution to prosecute the war, we sink into a whining lamentation on the abrupt termination of the treaty.  We have nothing left but the last resource of female weakness, of helpless infancy, of doting decrepitude,—­wailing and lamentation.  We cannot even utter a sentiment of vigor;—­“his Majesty has only to lament.”  A poor possession, to be left to a great monarch!  Mark the effect produced on our councils by continued insolence and inveterate hostility.  We grow more malleable under their blows.  In reverential silence we smother the cause and origin of the war.  On that fundamental article of faith we leave every one to abound in his own sense.  In the minister’s speech, glossing on the Declaration, it is indeed mentioned, but very feebly.  The lines are so faintly drawn as hardly to be traced.  They only make a part of our consolation in the circumstances which we so dolefully lament.  We rest our merits on the humility, the earnestness of solicitation, and the perfect good faith of those submissions which have been used to persuade our Regicide enemies to grant us some sort of peace.  Not a word is said which might not have been full as well said, and much better too, if the British nation had appeared in the simple character of a penitent convinced of his errors and offences, and offering, by penances, by pilgrimages, and by all the modes of expiation ever devised by anxious, restless guilt, to make all the atonement in his miserable power.

The Declaration ends, as I have before quoted it, with a solemn voluntary pledge, the most full and the most solemn that ever was given, of our resolution (if so it may be called) to enter again into the very same course.  It requires nothing more of the Regicides than to famish some sort of excuse, some sort of colorable pretest, for our renewing the supplications of innocence at the feet of guilt.  It leaves the moment of negotiation, a most important moment, to the choice of the enemy.  He is to regulate it according to the convenience of his affairs.  He is to bring it forward at that time when it may best serve to establish his authority at home and to extend his power abroad, A dangerous assurance for this nation to give, whether it is broken or whether it is kept.  As