all the high thoughts and high feelings that connect us with the honored names of past ages; and inspire sentiments and language, to which our Hampdens, Sidneys, and Russels, might listen without jealousy. He The late peace then was negotiated by the government, ratified by the legislature, and received by the nation, as an experiment,- -as the only means of exhibiting such proof as would be satisfactory to the people in their then temper; whether Bonaparte devoting his ambition and activity to the re-establishment of trade, colonial tranquillity, and social morals, in France, would abstain from insulting, alarming and endangering the British empire. And these thanks at least were due to the First Consul, that he did not long delay the proof. With more than papal insolence he issued edicts of anathema against us, and excommunicated us from all interference in the affairs of the continent. insulted us still more indecently by pertinacious demands respecting our constitutional laws and rights of hospitality; by the of ficial publication of Sebastiani's report; and by a direct personal outrage offered in the presence of all the foreign ministers to the king of England, in the person of his ambassador. He both insulted and alarmed us by a display of the most perfidious ambition in the subversion of the independence of Switzerland, in the avowal of designs against Egypt, Syria, and the Greek islands, and in the mission of military spies to Great Britain itself. And by forcibly maintaining a French army in Holland, he at once insulted, alarmed, and endangered us. What can render a war just-its expedience being pre-supposed-if insult, repeated alarm, and danger do not? And how can it be expedient for a rich, united, and powerful island-empire to remain in nominal peace and unresenting passiveness with an insolent neighbor, who has proved that to wage against it an unmitigated war of insult, alarm, and endangerment is both his temper and his system? Many attempts were made by Mr. Fox to explain away the force of the greater number of the facts here enumerated: but the great fact, for which alone they have either force or meaning, the great ultimate fact, that Great Britain had been insulted, alarmed, and endangered by France, Mr. Fox himself expressly admitted. The opposers, however, of the present war concentre the strength of their cause in the following brief argument. Although we grant, say they, the grievances set forth in our mani festo to be as notorious as they are asserted to be, yet more notorious they can not be than that other fact which utterly annuls them as reasons for a war,-the fact, that ministers themselves regard them only as the pompous garnish of the dish. It stands on record, that Bonaparte might have purchased our silence forever, respecting these insults and injuries, by a mere acquiescence on his part in our retention of Malta. The whole treaty of Amiens is little more than a perplexed bond of compromise respecting Malta. On Malta we rested the peace for Malta we renewed the war. So say the opposers of the present war. As its advocate I do not deny the fact as stated by them; but I hope to achieve all, and more than all, the purposes of such denial, by an explanation of the fact. The difficulty then resolves itself into two questions: first, in what sense of the words can we be said to have gone to war for Malta alone? Secondly, wherein does the importance of Malta consist? The answer to the second will be found in the notice of the life of Sir Alexander Ball, the liberator and political father of the Maltese, contained in a subsequent part of this work :* while the attempt to settle the first question, so as at the same time to elucidate the law of nations and its identity with the law of conscience, will occupy the remainder of the present essay. I. IN WHAT SENSE CAN WE BE AFFIRMED TO HAVE RENEWED THE WAR FOR MALTA ALONE ? war. If we had known or could reasonably have believed, that the views of France were and would continue to be friendly or negative toward Great Britain, neither the subversion of the independence of Switzerland, nor the maintenance of a French army in Holland, would have furnished any prudent ground for For the only way by which we could have injured France, namely, the destruction of her commerce and navy, would increase her means of continental conquests, by concentrating all the resources and energies of the French empire in her military powers: while the losses and miseries which the French people would suffer in consequence, and their magnitude, compared with any advantages that might accrue to them from the extension of the name, France, were facts which, we knew by ex * See Essays 3, 4, 5, 6, of the third Landing Place.-Ed. perience, would weigh as nothing with the existing government. Its attacks on the independence of its continental neighbors became motives to us for the recommencement of hostility, only as far as they gave proofs of a hostile intention toward ourselves, and facilitated the realizing of such intention. If any events had taken place, increasing the means of injuring this country, even though these events furnished no moral ground of complaint against France (such for instance, might be the great extension of her population and revenue, from freedom and a wise government), much more, if they were the fruits of iniquitous ambition, and therefore in themselves involved the probability of a hostile intention to us-then, I say, every after occurrence would become important, and both a just and expedient ground of war, in proportion, not to the importance of the thing in itself, but to the quantity of evident proof afforded by it to a hostile design in the government, by whose power our interests are endangered. If by demanding the immediate evacuation of Malta, when he had himself destroyed the security of its actual independence on his promise of preserving which our pacific promises rested as on their sole foundation-and this too, after he had openly avowed such designs on Egypt, as not only in the opinion of our ministers, but in his own opinion, made it of the greatest importance to this country, that Malta should not be under French influence;-if by this conduct the First Consul exhibited a decisive proof of his intention to violate our rights and to undermine our national interests; then all his preceding actions on the continent became proofs likewise of the same intention; and any one* of these aggressions involved the meaning * A hundred cases might be imagined which would place this assertion in its true light. Suppose, for instance, a country, according to the laws of which a parent might not disinherit a son without having first convicted him of some one of sundry crimes enumerated in a specific statute. Caius, by a series of vicious actions, has so nearly convinced his father of his utter worthlessness, that the father resolves, on the next provocation, to use the very first opportunity of legally disinheriting this son. The provocation occurs, and in itself furnishes this opportunity, and Caius is disinherited, though for an action much less glaring and intolerable than most of his preceding delinquencies had been. The advocates of Caius complain that he should be thus punished for a comparative trifle, so many worse misdemeanors having been passed over. The father replies: "This, his last action, is not the cause of the disinheritance; but the means of disinheriting of the whole. Which of them was to determine us to war would be decided by other and prudential considerations. Had the First Consul acquiesced in our detention of Malta, he would thereby have furnished such proof of pacific intentions, as would have led to further hopes, would have lessened our alarm from his former acts of ambition, and relatively to us have altered in some degree their nature. It should never be forgotten, that a parliament or national council is essentially different from a court of justice, alike in its objects and its duties. In the latter, the juror lays aside his private knowledge and his private connections, and judges exclusively according to the evidence adduced in the court in the former, the senator acts upon his own internal convictions, and oftentimes upon private information, which it would be imprudent or criminal to disclose. Though his ostensible reason ought to be a true and just one, it is by no means necessary that it should be his sole or even his chief reason. In a court of justice, the juror attends to the character and general intentions of the accused party, exclusively, as adding to the probability of his having or not having committed the one particular action then in question. The senator, on the contrary, when he is to determine on the conduct of a foreign power, attends to particular actions, chiefly in proof of character and existing intentions. Now there were many and very powerful reasons why, though appealing to the former actions of Bonaparte, as confirmations of his hostile spirit and alarming ambition, we should nevertheless make Malta the direct object and final determinant of the Had we gone to war avowedly for the independence of Holland and Switzerland, we should have furnished Bonaparte with a colorable pretext for annexing both countries immediately to the French empire,* which, if he should do (as if his power him. I punished him by it, rather than for it. In truth, it was not for any of his actions that I have thus punished him, but for his vices; that is, not so much for the injuries which I have suffered, as for the dispositions which these actions evinced: for the insolent and alarming intentions of which they are proofs. Now of this habitual temper, of these dangerous purposes, his last action is as true and complete a manifestation as any or all of his preceding offences; and it therefore may and must be taken as their common representative." war. *The greater part of this essay was written in the year 1804, in Malta, at the request of Sir Alexander Ball. continued he most assuredly would sooner or later) by a mere act of violence, and undisguised tyranny, there would follow a moral weakening of his power in the minds of men, which might prove of incalculable advantage to the independence and wellbeing of Europe; but which, unfortunately, for this very reason, that it is not to be calculated, is too often disregarded by ordinary statesmen. At all events, it would have been made the plea for banishing, plundering, and perhaps murdering, numbers of virtuous and patriotic individuals, as being the partisans of the enemy of the continent. Add to this, that we should have appeared to have rushed into a war for objects which by war we could not hope to realize; we should have exacerbated the misfortunes of the countries of which we had elected ourselves the champions; and the war would have appeared a mere war of revenge and reprisal, a circumstance always to be avoided where it is possible. The ablest and best men in the Batavian republic, those who felt the insults of France most acutely, and were suffering from her oppressions the most severely, entreated our government, through their minister, not to make the state of Holland the great ostensible reason of the war. The Swiss patriots, too, believed that we could do nothing to assist them at that time, and attributed to our forbearance the comparatively timid use which France has made hitherto of her absolute power over that country. Besides, Austria, whom the changes on the continent much more nearly concerned than England, having refused all co-operation with us, there is reason to fear that an opinion, destructive of the one great blessing purchased by the peace, our national unanimity, would have taken deep root in the popular mind, namely, that these changes were mere pretexts. Neither should we forget, that the last war had left a dislike in our countrymen to continental interference, and a not unplausible persuasion, that where a nation has not sufficient sensibility as to its wrongs to commence a war against the aggressor, unbribed and ungoaded by Great Britain, a war begun by the government of such a nation, at the instance of our government, has little chance of other than a disastrous result, the character and revolutionary resources of the enemy considered. Whatever may be the strength or weakness of this argument, it is however certain, that there was a strong predilection in the British people for a cause indisputably and peculiarly British. And this |