e silence--the passionate
exclamations--the sighs and shame of every man who is worthy to breathe
the air or to look upon the green-fields of Liberty in this blessed and
highly-favoured Island which we inhabit.

If I were speaking of things however weighty, that were long past and
dwindled in the memory, I should scarcely venture to use this language;
but the feelings are of yesterday--they are of to-day; the flower, a
melancholy flower it is! is still in blow, nor will, I trust, its leaves
be shed through months that are to come: for I repeat that the heart of
the nation is in this struggle. This just and necessary war, as we have
been accustomed to hear it styled from the beginning of the contest in
the year 1793, had, some time before the Treaty of Amiens, viz. after
the subjugation of Switzerland, and not till then, begun to be regarded
by the body of the people, as indeed both just and necessary; and this
justice and necessity were by none more clearly perceived, or more
feelingly bewailed, than by those who had most eagerly opposed the war
in its commencement, and who continued most bitterly to regret that this
nation had ever borne a part in it. Their conduct was herein consistent:
they proved that they kept their eyes steadily fixed upon principles;
for, though there was a shifting or transfer of hostility in their minds
as far as regarded persons, they only combated the same enemy opposed to
them under a different shape; and that enemy was the spirit of selfish
tyranny and lawless ambition. This spirit, the class of persons of whom
I have been speaking, (and I would now be understood, as associating
them with an immense majority of the people of Great Britain, whose
affections, notwithstanding all the delusions which had been practised
upon them, were, in the former part of the contest, for a long time on
the side of their nominal enemies,) this spirit, when it became
undeniably embodied in the French government, they wished, in spite of
all dangers, should be opposed by war; because peace was not to be
procured without submission, which could not but be followed by a
communion, of which the word of greeting would be, on the one part,
insult,--and, on the other, degradation. The people now wished for war,
as their rulers had done before, because open war between nations is a
defined and effectual partition, and the sword, in the hands of the good
and the virtuous, is the most intelligible symbol of abhorrence. I