ccustomed to fly to the succour of your distressed allies, leaving
the distressed of your own country to the care of Providence or--the
parish. When the Portuguese suffered under the retreat of the French,
every arm was stretched out, every hand was opened, from the rich
man's largess to the widow's mite, all was bestowed, to enable them
to rebuild their villages and replenish their granaries. And at this
moment, when thousands of misguided but most unfortunate
fellow-countrymen are struggling with the extremes of hardships and
hunger, as your charity began abroad it should end at home. A much
less sum, a tithe of the bounty bestowed on Portugal, even if those
men (which I cannot admit without enquiry) could not have been
restored to their employments, would have rendered unnecessary the
tender mercies of the bayonet and the gibbet. But doubtless our
friends have too many foreign claims to admit a prospect of domestic
relief; though never did such objects demand it. I have traversed the
seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most
oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most despotic of
infidel governments did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have
seen since my return in the very heart of a Christian country. And
what are your remedies? After months of inaction, and months of
action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand
specific, the never-failing nostrum of all state physicians, from the
days of Draco to the present time. After feeling the pulse and
shaking the head over the patient, prescribing the usual course of
warm water and bleeding, the warm water of your mawkish police, and
the lancets of your military, these convulsions must terminate in
death, the sure consummation of the prescriptions of all political
Sangrados. Setting aside the palpable injustice and the certain
inefficiency of the bill, are there not capital punishments
sufficient in your statutes? Is there not blood enough upon your
penal code, that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and
testify against you? How will you carry the bill into effect? Can you
commit a whole county to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet
in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows? or will you proceed
(as you must to bring this measure into effect) by decimation? place
the county under martial law? depopulate and lay waste all around
you? and restore Sherwood Forest as an acceptable gift to the crown,
i