They who are not at leisure to examine these books and pamphlets will find the volumes of the Annual Register an excellent substitute for them all. They contain, in the most concise form, the most able, impartial, and authentic history of the dispute which can be found. The account is understood to have been drawn up by Burke, and if so (and there is no doubt of it), the arguments on each side are displayed with an impartiality that is quite admirable.

Lastly, from these works and from others have been drawn up the histories of Adolphus and Belsham. These histories may be read by those who can read no more, but they must neither of them be read separately or without the other. They are drawn up on very different principles :-Belsham, conceiving that the Americans were right in their resistance; Adolphus thinking, certainly wishing his readers to think, that they were entirely wrong: the one written on what are called Whig, and the other on Tory principles of government. The one is, I conceive, sometimes too indulgent to the congress; the other, always so to the English ministry. Belsham I consider as by far the most reasonable of the two in every thing that is laid down respecting the American war. The objectionable passages in Adolphus I found so many, that after taking notes for the purpose, I saw them swell to such a size, that all comment of this kind appeared to me in a lecture quite impossible, and you must learn to comment upon them yourselves, as I have done, by the perusal of better writers. The merit of Adolphus is, that he puts the reader very fairly in possession of the views and arguments of Lord Chatham and others, who opposed the system, that, in defiance of them, he himself espouses.

I should expect, then, on the whole, that these two, Belsham and Adolphus, and the particular parts of the Annual Register, would at least be read by every one who hears me. Ramsay should next be added; his history is short: and, if possible, much of the fourth and fifth volumes of Marshal. Burke's speeches will of course be read; and any pamphlet that was written by such a man as Dr. Johnson. Lord Chatham was so considerable a personage during this period, that the life of him which has been published, which is at least

the best account of him and his speeches that we have, should by no means be overlooked.

And here I might, perhaps, leave the subject, having endeavoured to excite your curiosity, and pointed out the best means I know of gratifying it. Aware, too, that all proper instruction will be offered to you by the works I have mentioned, the rest must be labour and reflection on your part; and you must become wiser and better on this occasion as on others (a sentiment this I have often expressed to you) by the faithful exertion and virtuous use of the talents and opportunities intrusted to your disposal.

I am, however, not satisfied without attempting to do more than I have yet done; without attempting to assist you in shaping out this instruction into a few distinct and palpable masses. Many of you who hear me may be destined to have influence hereafter; as men of education, you can none of you be entirely without it; and neither the world nor our own island are in a state, as I have before intimated, to admit of any indolence or ignorance on political subjects in those who ought to be the efficient members of the community.

I shall, therefore, in the first place, comment upon the principles and measures of the supporters of the American war on this side of the Atlantic; then on the other side of the Atlantic. Next, on the conduct of the war itself. In the last place, on the people of America.

Many lessons may, no doubt, be drawn from each; many more than have occurred to me; many more than I can here conveniently lay before you: what however appear to me of the most importance I will select and state to you.

North America, as you know, was peopled and civilized chiefly by adventurers from this country; that is, in a word, England was the parent and America the dependent state. I have already made observations on the connexions of different states with each other; I did so in my lecture on the union with Scotland. These observations it would be very convenient to me, if I could on this occasion recall to your recollection.

The sum and substance, however, of them was, that, in such a case as this before us, in the case of a mother country

and colonies, an ultimate separation of the two was the result to which the progress of the prosperity of the dependant state naturally tended; that, as in the relation of parent and child, helplessness is to be succeeded by strength, strength by maturity, maturity by independence, so in states and empires issuing from each other, new sentiments and new duties are to arise from the changing situation of the parties, and that it is the business and the wisdom of the parent state, more particularly, to conform without a murmur to those eternal laws which have ordained a constant progress in all things, and which have decreed that nations, like individuals, are no longer to require from youth and from manhood the blind and unconditional submission which is connected with the imbecility and inexperience of the infant and the child; that by skill and forbearance this ultimate separation may be protracted to the benefit of the mother country, but that the separation itself must be always kept in view as an issue at length inevitable, and that the euthanasia of the connexion is an affectionate intercourse of good offices, an alliance of more than ordinary sympathy and sincerity, and a gradual transmutation of the notions of protection and submission, of supremacy and allegiance, into those of interchanged regard and respect, into those of a sense of common interest in the friendship and kindness and growing prosperity of each other.

Such must always be the philosophy of the case when the colonies can ever, by their extent and natural fertility, be advanced into any situation imitating that of the son to the father in the relations of social life. In the one case as in the other, much unhappiness may be caused, much injury may arise, both to the parent and to the child, by a want of good temper and compliance with the ordinances of nature; but the wisdom which these ordinances point out is at all times the same, equally obvious and indispensable.

Now the case of America and England was one precisely of this nature. America in extent boundless, in natural advantages unexampled, removed to a distance from the mother country, how was it possible that the natural tendency of things, in all other cases, should, in this particular case of America and England, cease to operate? To what end, in

deed, or purpose, as far as the best interests of either, or the great interests of humanity and the world were concerned? Why was a great continent, a country of lakes, into which our island might be thrown and buried; of forests, which might overshadow our principalities and kingdoms; of falls and cataracts, which might sweep away our cities; and of descending seas, to which our noblest streams might in comparison be thought but rivulets and brooks: why was such a country, which the God of nature had clothed with all his highest forms of magnificence and grandeur; why was such a country, though in the mysterious dispensations of his providence it was to be raised into existence by an island in the old world; why was it to be impeded in its career by the manacles that were to be thrown over its giant limbs by the selfishness of its parent-why prevented from rushing on in its destined race, to become itself the new world, as Europe had been the old, teeming with the life and glowing with the business of human society, and doubling, trebling, multiplying to an indefinite extent the number of sentient beings, to which our planet may give support; why prevented from journeying on with all the accumulating resources of its independent strength, till the same progress of things which had thus ripened the colony into a kingdom, and a kingdom into the new Europe of the western hemisphere, should have advanced the planet itself to its final consummation, and the labours and the grandeur and the happiness of man, on this side the grave, should be no more?

There surely could be no reason, either on any general system of benevolence or on any practical scheme of human policy, why these great laws of our particular portion of the universe should not be cheerfully acquiesced in by any intelligent statesman, should not be patiently submitted to as a matter of necessity by every practical politician in the parent state. What other hope, what possible alternative, presented itself? Stay the sun in its course, because he has warmed the nations of the Atlantic till they are no longer dependent on our bounty!-arrest the principles of increase and decay, because they no longer appear to operate to our particular aggrandizement! Vain and hopeless efforts! Rather turn the opportunities and indulgences of nature which yet remain

to their best advantage; far better to be grateful to the Author of all good for blessings past and to come, and not from a blind, preposterous, unschooled, and irreverent ambition, fret and struggle where it is in vain to contend, and perhaps hurry on, a century or two before their time, all those evils of comparative decline and decreasing power which are now terrifying your imagination, and interrupting all the regular conclusions of the understanding. Protract, if you please, by all the expedients of mild government, the day of separation; but to endeavour to adjourn it for ever, and that by force, is ridiculous, for it is in the very nature of things impossible.

Views of this kind should certainly have presented themselves to our statesmen soon after the middle of the last century. It was not necessary that they should be displayed in their speeches in parliament, or in their conversation in private society. But assuredly they should have been present to their minds when they came to speculate in their closets, and still more when they came to advise their sovereign in his cabinets.

Great caution, and a most conciliatory system of government from England to America, would no doubt have been the result; no high assertions of authority either in theory or in practice; no search into dormant claims; no statements and adjustments of rights and duties, before uncertain and undefined; no agitation of perilous questions of supremacy and obedience; no experiments of legislation for the exclusive benefit of the parent state; in short, nothing that should disturb that general tendency which may be observed in mankind to retain their habits of thinking and acting (all these would have been in favour of the mother country), long after the reasons in which they originated have ceased to exist.

Had sentiments of this kind influenced the councils of Great Britain soon after the accession of his present majesty to the throne, it is impossible to say how long the two countries might have slumbered on in a long-established system of generous superintendence on the one side, and habitual confidence and duty on the other. Many think the French revolution would not have happened, had not the American