as a stranger, a wanderer, and a friend. And they knew that by every rule of morality, hospitality and law, they were bound to receive him, if at all, as he proposed to come. Had they inquired their duty of the Bedouins of the desert, of the wandering Tartars, or of the North American Indians, they would have been told—“ Our common Creator, author of the ills common to humanity in all ages and climes, hath impressed even upon our untutored hearts the duty of hospitality; and you cannot violate that duty without committing the double crime of treachery and murder-crimes which, when permitted, are the infallible symptoms of national death,--the harbingers of God's vengeance.”

Suppose, therefore, that Captain Maitland had really given no assurances, public or private, of his treatment by England, but had informed him, as he says he did, but which is plainly a falsehood, that “he must consider himself entirely at the disposal of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, (in which statement he is entirely unsupported by a single witness, English ör French,) how could such a declaration change the duty of the British Government, to accept his voluntary visit, if they permitted it at all

, exactly as it was offered? If your enemy comes into your house and announces to you at the threshhold that he comes to supplicate your protection, and you bow to him and receive him under your roof, we beg to know by what process the duty of protection which you thus assume becomes transmuted into a right to slay or enslave him? It is the right of fraud and force united, and it is nothing else.

Besides; Napoleon being, as we have seen, a French subject, was incompetent to consent to be held as a prisoner for a longer period than during the then existing war, after which the right of his country to his services, had she sought them, revived.*

We have said that Napoleon was a suppliant. That is a condition perfectly well recognized in the code of nations. It was the earliest to be respected, because it was the earliest felt to be unavoidable. It is the right of misfortune

a right sacredly observed among the ancient Hebrews -by which the innocent fugitive driven from his own country, and resorting to their cities of refuge, was held to be under the protection of the state. We are told that the ancient people of Chalcis refused to give up to the Greeks one of their chiefs in the Trojan war who, being erroneously suspected by them of having wilfully shipwrecked a part of the Grecian fleet on its return from that war, had fled to the Chalcedons for refuge. The Athenians erected an altar to mercy, inscribed “ sacred to the unfortunate

, to those overcome in war, those driven from their own country, those destitute of legal protection ;" which Aristedes makes the peculiar glory of Athens, for the reason that it was " for a refuge and a consolation to all the unfortunate whencesoever they might come, and a security against oppression.”+ It is lauded not only by Demosthenes and the Greek poets, but by Cicero, and other enlightened Latin authors. One of the most terrible accusations brought against Marius by the historian Sallust was, that he refused protection to those who came to him as suppliants. I

But we need not appeal to written rules on the subject ; the heart of man constitutes the code. England was herself long the asylum of the

dispersed and expelled Bourbons and French royalists, whom she protected, clothed, fed, and many of whom she paid. The United States were the refuge of the fugitives of all parties except the Pretender and his immediate adherents, who, thank heaven, never asked the honor of breathing the air of our skies. Turkey received Charles XII. of Sweden, as a suppliant, and the "repose of Europe" was not urged by Peter the Great as a reason for violating his sanctuary. Louis XIV. received James Second of England and his Queen, as suppliants; Xerxes received as a suppliant Themistocles, his great enemy, by whom his mighty expedition against Greece had been totally defeated; the Kings of Persia as well as the northern barbarians, during their long wars with the Roman emperors, offered an asylum to many Roman statesmen who had incurred the displeasure of their sovereigns, and became suppliants. And there are perhaps fewer examples of the violation of this than of any other national usage. The reason is plain-the claim is one which addresses itself to the heart, and at once puts to shame the calculations of policy; it arises from want and exposure to danger, from which no human condition is exempt; it is the cry of helpless infancy for sustenance; it is the appeal of despair for life and protection, the faint and agonized call of the man who with broken arm is sinking beneath the wave to the strong swimmer to lend him a hand; appeals which the soul of a man can neither resist nor stop to discuss.

That Napoleon had at all times a perfectly correct conception of his real position, and that he regarded it as that of a suppliant, is proved by his conduct. The example of Themistocles appealing to the King of Persia, was as sublime and striking as it was in point; it communicated in the fittest, the most modest, and at the same time the most flattering way, his own view of his relations to the English monarch. But the ministry-that half-human progeny of the lust of gold and lust of powerwere as insensible as avarice to the calls of compassion, as obdurate as highwaymen dividing the spoils of the night, and jesting at the crimes which won them. What was it to them that he was without a home or a country, severed from his wife and child, ensnared into their power by the lies of their minion, free even by their own laws and the laws of nations, the greatest, the noblest of living men; was he not, nevertheless, actually in their clutches, and should they not wreak upon him the vengeance with which his great name and his thousand victories so justly inspired them? What was the use in being magnanimous? in forbearing to trample on a fallen foe? in admitting the ridiculous "rights of misfortune?" Had they not rent into a thousand atoms the cordon of his continental system, established the omnipotence of English commerce in Europe and Asia, and prepared the whole world to pass under the yoke of the manufacturers and stockholders of England? Had they not spent uncounted millions in the great enterprise of enabling that little island to give commercial and maritime laws to the world? and should they now run the risk of losing this precious investment by suffering "this fellow"* to enjoy "air and water" in England or America? "Are we not," we may imagine them to have exclaimed, "powerful enough to face down and put down the vulgar herd of whiners and croakers, here and elsewhere,

* Lord Eldon's expression.

who shall be so presumptous as to question the justice of our conduct, or to dispute our infallible word when, with potent tone, we say that we do this act for the “REPOSE OF EUROPE'--for the PEACE OF THE WORLD'for the SECURITY OF THE LEGITIMATE RULERS OF NATIONS ? Do not these ideas open broad fields for discussion and argument? Can we not assert, and pay myriads of needy authors and orators for asserting, that this fellow' was a prisoner of war, an exception to all examples in the law of nations ? that he is an habitual treaty-breaker, a robber, a ferocious beast, attracted by the scent of blood-a sort of one-eyed, man-eating monster, thristing to devour men, women and children ? and that their safety requires that we should, like Ulysses, bore out his eye? Can we not make the people of England and Scotland, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain, and--what is that small settlement of half-barbarous people on the other side of our Atlantic Ocean ? America--can we not make them all believe in these reasons, these pious truths ? The Lord-Chancellor, rather than lose his place, will assuredly frame a profound and unanswerable argument in our defense, which we shall be enabled, by dint of power, ridicule and bluster, to have incorporated into the laws of nations, and thus we shall, in advance, conquer the good opinion of posterity ;--for whom, by the way, we care as little as we do for this helpless slave whom we now send to be scorched to death under the tropics. We have broken the back of France, and caught the ringleader of the gibbering tribe that has been playing his pranks and stealing our sweetmeats for a quarter of a century. Away then with all this rigmarole about 'honor;' the great type of our nation has very justly taught us that it is worthless in a dead man, and that it will not fill a hungry belly.”

And for reasons like these, the crime, the most flagrant in history, was committed; the highest, most ruthless exertion of arbitrary power in the annals of any nation; a mixture of fraud and force without necessity, in utter contempt of the claims of Eternal Justice.

Providence has never failed to punish nations for such crimes; and unless all history be a pointless fiction, that blow shall be the heaviest which England shall be able to strike. It was murder, committed in cold blood for the sake of gain. The image of the slain one shall haunt her in her lonely walks, and sit down with her, a horrid vision, at her feasts; it shall appear to her guilty conscience, on the sea and on the shore; and when the cries of her oppressed people shall ascend to heaven, invoking vengeance upon her rulers, the voice of the great departed, uttered in his protest, shall ring in her ears and freeze her with the horrid consciousness that she too is FRIENDLESS!

“I here protest, solemnly, in the face of Heaven and of men, against the violence which is done me; against the violation of my most sacred rights, in disposing by force of my person and my liberty. °I came freely on board the Bellerophon. I am not a prisoner; I am the guest of Eng: land. I came on board at the instigation even of the captain, who said he had orders from his government to receive and conduct me to Eng. land, with my suite, should that be agreeable to me. I presented myself in good faith, in order to place myself under the protection of the laws of England.' As soon as I seated myself on board the Bellerophon, I was at the hearth of the British people. If the governnient, in giving orders to the captain of the Bellerophon to receive me and ing suite,

sought only to spread a snare, it has forfeited its honor and tarnished its flag. If this act shall be consummated, it will be in vain that Englishmen speak to Europe of their loyalty, their laws, and their liberty. British faith will find itself lost in the hospitality of the Bellerophon. For this I appeal to history. It will say, that an enemy who for twenty years made war upon the English people, came freely, in his misfortunes, to seek an asylum under their laws. What more striking proof could he give them of his esteem and confidence? But how did the rulers of England respond to such magnanimity? They feigned to stretch forth the hand of hospitality to that enemy, and when he yielded himself up in good faith, they immolated him.

"On board of the Bellerophon, 4th Aug., 1815.”

"NAPOLEON.

And such will be, and ought to be the verdict of History. It is the language of a prophet, whose pervading spirit pierced the future, leaping from the purblind bigotry of the present, and surveying the long tract of time as from the highest pinnacle of its history.

The prophecy will be fulfilled, and justice vindicated. The retributive law will not be mocked. It will pursue pride in all her goings and comings,-in prosperity and in adversity, and wheresoever she may turn, she will be compelled to gaze upon the Gorgon-headed divinity until she is petrified.

We cannot close without citing one striking example of retributive justice between nations. The Goths, on the north of the Danube, had been pressed to such extremities by the victorious Huns, that, though they had often been at war with the Romans, they were compelled to apply to the emperor as suppliants for protection and hospitality. They were permitted to pass the Danube, and were received as guests and friends. Soon, however, the most grievous exactions were made upon them; they were defrauded and attempted to be disarmed; and, finally, as they became more menacing and formidable in their resistance to oppression, a plan was laid by the Roman Government to massacre all the Gothic youth in the East, upon a given day. Under pretext of attending the public games, the innocent unsuspecting Goths were assembled together in the various villages; the streets were occupied by the Roman troops, and the roofs of the houses covered with archers and slingers. At the same moment, throughout all the towns of the East, the Gothic youth were cruelly massacred by the command of the Roman sovereign; a breach of hospitality expiated by nothing less than the sacking of Rome and the final extinction of the Roman power. Terrible but just retribution! The great historian of the Decline and Fall, commenting on this "cruel prudence of the emperor," remarks, with characteristic force and beauty: "The urgent consideration of the public safety may, undoubtedly, authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that or any other consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant."

JUDICIAL ENCROACHMENT.

The fact, that of the two nations on the earth which are farthest advanced on the road of human freedom, the one has a written, and the other an unwritten constitution, is less the cause than the necessary effect of great and organic differences between them. To say that Americans are essentially a migratory, restless, and rapidly advancing people, that they are peculiarly economical of time, and that one of their most striking characteristics is to endeavor to produce the greatest possible results from the smallest means, and the least expenditure of labor capable of effecting them, is merely to enunciate an undoubted truism, which all assent to and none doubt. To reconcile these various qualities, that is, to spend the least possible time and labor, to produce the greatest results, and at the same time to leave our mobile tendency wholly unchecked, we have long since found was only to be done by going to the very origin of things, by discovering and making known great truths and general principles, and leaving the practical and individual aplication of them to each occasion as it arose, and we also discovered that time and effort spent in these preliminary and fundamental researches is well spent, saving an incalculable amount of both afterwards ; for when a gene ral principle is once developed the practical adaptation of it is comparatively easy, but if the great truth is unknown, a laborious process of research and experiment must be gone through whenever it is to be applied.

Perhaps there never was a man in whom this American nature was so well developed as in Franklin. Let any one read his letters and see with what humble means he was continually operating, yet where shall we find greater or more brilliant results than he effected with a silk handkerchief and a door key, a glass tube, some sealing wax, and a sheet of paper. He brought the lightning of heaven to his feet; with these puny instruments he proved what the learned of the world, surrounded by all the appliances which science could suggest or wealth purchase, had failed to demonstrate, or to suspect. It is the same peculiarity which has produced our political as well as our social character, and which induced our ancestors to go through long and wearying toil, in order to discover the great truths which lie at the bottom of political and governmental science, and to leave to us, their posterity, a constitution essentially one of general principles. Human progress tends to simplicity, and our constitution is in advance of that of England by as much as it exceeds it in simpleness.

The English constitution is an undigested mass of results--a huge charnelhouse of decided precedents. It contains the material on which to operate, but the great process of induction has never been applied to it. It is like the beast we read of in nursery booksma very kind beast and a very good beast; but till the beauty will kiss its hairy lipits whole shape is terrible and repulsive. The magic kiss has never humanized the beast of the English con. stitution; it still preserves, to all appearance, its lumpish brutality, and demands no small degree of nerve on the part of those who would approach it.

This is the immediate result of English statesmanship, the mediate one of the English character. No troops but Englishmen could have conquered in their place at Waterloo. None but men who have not only a grand