atesmanlike decision. The struggle on the Continent was at an
end; but they resolved to gird it with a chain of fire. Every port was
shut up by English guns; every shore was watched by English eyes. Outside
this chain, the world was our own. The ocean was free; every sea was
traversed by our commerce with as much security as in the most profound
peace. The contrast with the Continent was of the most striking order.
There all was the dungeon--one vast scene of suffering and outcry; of
coercion and sorrow; the conscription, the confiscation, the licensed
plunder, the bitter and perpetual insult. The hearts of men died within
them, and they crept silently to their obscure graves. Wounds, poverty,
and ferocious tyranny, the heart-gnawing pangs of shame, and the thousand
thorns which national and conscious degradation strews on the pillow of
men crushed by the insolence of a soldiery, wore away the human race;
provinces were unpeopled, and a generation were laid prematurely in the
grave.

The recollections of the living world will long point to this period as
the most menacing portion of all history. The ancient tyrannies were bold,
presumptuous, and remorseless monopolies of power; but their pressure
scarcely descended to the multitude. It crushed the senator, the
patrician, and the man of opulence; as the tempest smites the turrets of
the palace, or shatters the pinnacles of the mountain range. But the
despotism of France searched the humblest condition of man. It tyrannized
over the cottage, as fiercely as it had swept over the thrones. The German
or Italian peasant saw his son torn away, to perish in some distant
region, of which he knew no more than that it was the grave of the
thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow shepherds and vintagers. The
despotism of France less resembled the domination of man, from which, with
all its vigilance, there is some hope of escape, than the subtlety of a
demon, which has an evil and a sting for every heart, and by which nothing
can be forgotten, and nothing will be spared. In the whole immense circle
of French dominion, no man could lay his head down to rest, with a
security that he might not be roused at midnight, to be flung into a
captivity from which he was never to return. No man could look upon his
property, the earnings of his manhood, the resource for his age, or the
provision for his children, without the knowledge that it was at the mercy
of the plunderer; no man could