hed by the commerce of them all? By the
express provisions of a recent treaty, we had engaged with the King of
Naples to keep a naval force in the Mediterranean. But, good God! was a
treaty at all necessary for this? The uniform policy of this kingdom as
a state, and eminently so as a commercial state, has at all times led us
to keep a powerful squadron and a commodious naval station in that
central sea, which borders upon and which connects a far greater number
and variety of states, European, Asiatic, and African, than any other.
Without such a naval force, France must become despotic mistress of that
sea, and of all the countries whose shores it washes. Our commerce must
become vassal to her and dependent on her will. Since we are come no
longer to trust to our force in arms, but to our dexterity in
negotiation, and begin to pay a desperate court to a proud and coy
usurpation, and have finally sent an ambassador to the Bourbon Regicides
at Paris, the King of Naples, who saw that no reliance was to be placed
on our engagements, or on any pledge of our adherence to our nearest and
dearest interests, has been obliged to send his ambassador also to join
the rest of the squalid tribe of the representatives of degraded kings.
This monarch, surely, does not want any proof of the sincerity of our
amicable dispositions to that amicable republic, into whose arms he has
been given by our desertion of him.

To look to the powers of the North.--It is not to the Danish ambassador,
insolently treated in his own character and in ours, that we are to give
proofs of the Regicide arrogance, and of our disposition to submit to
it.

With regard to Sweden I cannot say much. The French influence is
struggling with her independence; and they who consider the manner in
which the ambassador of that power was treated not long since at Paris,
and the manner in which the father of the present King of Sweden
(himself the victim of regicide principles and passions) would have
looked on the present assassins of France, will not be very prompt to
believe that the young King of Sweden has made this kind of requisition
to the King of Great Britain, and has given this kind of auspice of his
new government.

I speak last of the most important of all. It certainly was not the late
Empress of Russia at whose instance we have given this pledge. It is not
the new Emperor, the inheritor of so much glory, and placed in a
situation of so much delicacy and d