is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.  Therefore all these negotiations, and all the declarations with which they were preceded and followed, can only serve to raise presumptions against that good faith and public integrity the fame of which to preserve inviolate is so much the interest and duty of every nation.

The pledge is an engagement “to all Europe.”  This is the more extraordinary, because it is a pledge which no power in Europe, whom I have yet heard of, has thought proper to require at our hands.  I am not in the secrets of office, and therefore I may be excused for proceeding upon probabilities and exterior indications.  I have surveyed all Europe from the east to the west, from the north to the south, in search of this call upon us to purge ourselves of “subtle duplicity and a Punic style” in our proceedings.  I have not heard that his Excellency the Ottoman ambassador has expressed his doubts of the British sincerity in our negotiation with the most unchristian republic lately set up at our door.  What sympathy in that quarter may have introduced a remonstrance upon the want of faith in this nation I cannot positively say.  If it exists, it is in Turkish or Arabic, and possibly is not yet translated.  But none of the nations which compose the old Christian world have I yet heard as calling upon us for those judicial purgations and ordeals, by fire and water, which we have chosen to go through;—­for the other great proof, by battle, we seem to decline.

For whose use, entertainment, or instruction are all those overstrained and overlabored proceedings in council, in negotiation, and in speeches in Parliament intended?  What royal cabinet is to be enriched with these high-finished pictures of the arrogance of the sworn enemies of kings and the meek patience of a British administration?  In what heart is it intended to kindle pity towards our multiplied mortifications and disgraces?  At best it is superfluous.  What nation is unacquainted with the haughty disposition of the common enemy of all nations?  It has been more than seen, it has been felt,—­not only by those who have been the victims of their imperious rapacity, but, in a degree, by those very powers who have consented to establish this robbery, that they might be able to copy it, and with impunity to make new usurpations of their own.

The King of Prussia has hypothecated in trust to the Regicides his rich and fertile territories on the Rhine, as a pledge of his zeal and affection to the cause of liberty and equality.  He has seen them robbed with unbounded liberty and with the most levelling equality.  The woods are wasted, the country is ravaged, property is confiscated, and the people are put to bear a double yoke, in the exactions of a tyrannical government and in the contributions of an hostile irruption.