11.  In all these motions and debates he wholly departed from all the political principles relative to France (considered merely as a state, and independent of its Jacobin form of government) which had hitherto been held fundamental in this country, and which he had himself held more strongly than any man in Parliament.  He at that time studiously separated himself from those to whose sentiments he used to profess no small regard, although those sentiments were publicly declared.  I had then no concern in the party, having been, for some time, with all outrage, excluded from it; but, on general principles, I must say that a person who assumes to be leader of a party composed of freemen and of gentlemen ought to pay some degree of deference to their feelings, and even to their prejudices.  He ought to have some degree of management for their credit and influence in their country.  He showed so very little of this delicacy, that he compared the alarm raised in the minds of the Duke of Portland’s party, (which was his own,) an alarm in which they sympathized with the greater part of the nation, to the panic produced by the pretended Popish plot in the reign of Charles the Second,—­describing it to be, as that was, a contrivance of knaves, and believed only by well-meaning dupes and madmen.

12.  The Monday following (the 17th of December) he pursued the same conduct.  The means used in England to cooeperate with the Jacobin army in politics agreed with their modes of proceeding:  I allude to the mischievous writings circulated with much industry and success, as well as the seditious clubs, which at that time added not a little to the alarm taken by observing and well-informed men.  The writings and the clubs were two evils which marched together.  Mr. Fox discovered the greatest possible disposition to favor and countenance the one as well as the other of these two grand instruments of the French system.  He would hardly consider any political writing whatsoever as a libel, or as a fit object of prosecution.  At a time in which the press has been the grand instrument of the subversion of order, of morals, of religion, and, I may say, of human society itself, to carry the doctrines of its liberty higher than ever it has been known by its most extravagant assertors, even in France, gave occasion to very serious reflections.  Mr. Fox treated the associations for prosecuting these libels as tending to prevent the improvement of the human mind, and as a mobbish tyranny.  He thought proper to compare them with the riotous assemblies of Lord George Gordon in 1780, declaring that he had advised his friends in Westminster to sign the associations, whether they agreed to them or not, in order that they might avoid destruction to their persons or their houses, or a desertion of their shops.  This insidious advice tended to confound those who wished well to the object of the association with the seditious against whom the association was directed.  By this stratagem, the confederacy intended for preserving the British Constitution and the public peace would be wholly defeated.  The magistrates, utterly incapable of distinguishing the friends from the enemies of order, would in vain look for support, when they stood in the greatest need of it.