their service could be no longer useful in their own! Do we mean to say, that these persons had no claim upon us, to the extent of what they asked? Or that we could not afford the expense of receiving, and providing for so many additional emigrants ? Monstrous as either of these alle gations would be, they would still be better than what alone remains, the direct and unqualified confession, that we did not dare to admit into this country men, to whom we were bound by every tie to furnish a place of refuge and safety, lest by so doing we should give offence to our ene mies. In what a state must the probity of a great country be, when, in a case like the present, such a motive can be made a principle of action? to what must the mind of a country be reduced, when it can bear, that such a motive should become manifest to the world?

It may not be thought a trifling aggravavation, (if in such a mass of shame aggravations were worth thinking of,) that, just at this moment, a condemned, though pardoned traitor, Napper Tandy, is released from prison, and allowed to sail to France, yielded, we presume, as an act of grateful attention, a kind of marriage present, to the first Consul. Napper Tandy, be it remembered, was not a person to whom the faith of the French government was pledged by any publick declaration, unless it shall be contended, as perhaps it ought, that their decree of the 19th of November 1792 still continues in force: he was not a person engaged in one of those civil wars, of which history may furnish examples, wherein the rights and pretensions of the parties were so equally balanced, as to make it doubtful, on which of the two sides the crime of commencing hostilities and breaking up the public peace ought in justice to be charged. He was a traitor in the common sense of the word, and upon the clearest evidence of the thing, and was condemned according to the established principles, on which

the lives of such persons have become forfeit at all times, and in all countries. The first Consul however, as is supposed, thought fit to ask his release: and the government here complied with his request. Such was the state of the intercourse between the two countries on the subject of persons of this description. But the royalists of France, persons who had been acting in conformity to, perhaps in consequence of our proclamations; whose objects we had declared to be substantially our own; of whose assistance we had a right to avail ourselves, according to every principle of the law of nations; who are not to be confounded, as is often wickedly or ignorantly done, with rebels and traitors, the subverters of their respective governments, but were on the contrary the upholders of the constitution of their country in opposition to such rebels and traitors; to these royalists we refused an asylum, lest we should offend the irritable majesty of an usurper, and indispose him to grant such terms of peace, as those by which the safety of the country is now so happily secured. If these things do not disgrace and dishonour a country, I am at a loss to know, what the disgrace and dishonour of a country is. We seek to conciliate the favour of an imperious and vindictive enemy, by the desertion of our friends, and the sacrifice of our national faith and honour. Our enemy, we may rest assured, will only despise us the more, without our deriving from that feeling any relaxation of the motives, which have long led him to resolve on our destruction.

ARMY OF RESERVE.

June 20, 1803.

THE following Speech was delivered by Mr. Windham, in the

House of Commons, in disapprobation of the plan proposed by the Ministers for raising 50,000 men in England, Scotland, and Ireland, by way of ballot or military conscription. The plan described by the Secretary at War was as follows: A body of 50,000 men, to be called the Army of Reserve, was to be immediately raised by ballot, according to the following quotas: - the counties of England and Wales 31,000, London and the Tower Hamlets 3000, Scotland 6000, and Ireland 10,000. The conscripts were allowed to find substitutes, and the term of service was four years, with an extension, as to place, to any part of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Islands of Jersey and Guernsey. The Officers, to be commissioned by the King, were to come from the half-pay list of the Army, from the Marines, from the East India Company's Service, from persons who had served· as officers in Volunteer Yeomanry Corps in Ireland during the late Rebellion, and, if necessary, from the Recruiting Staff. Such were the outlines of the plan to which Mr.Windham made the objections that will be found in the following Speech:

MR. SPEAKER-SIR,

THE Honourable Gentleman has introduced this measure in a manner perfectly suitable to the solemnity of the occasion, and to the impression which such an occasion was likely to produce on his mind. I wish the measure itself had been equally suitable to the man

ner of its introduction, or to the circumstances out of which it has arisen. But, alas! it has fallen miserably short both of the occasion and of the expectation which I had allowed myself to form of it. Instead of helping us out of our difficulties, it serves only to confirm a most material part of them, and for the rest, to give us but very imperfect and inadequate assistance. This grand measure, of which so much expec, tation has been raised, turns out, at last, to be nothing more than a mere addition to the Militia, with all the evils incident to that system, perverted and misapplied as it has been for a period of several years past. In addition to 70,000 men raised or raising according to that system, upon the population of Great Britain, and of 18,000 so raised in Ireland, we are now to have 10,000 more for Ireland, and 40,000 for Great Britain, making in the whole the number of 138,000, of which 18,000 (the original militia in Ireland) are to be raised by bounty in the first instance, and the rest to be raised by ballot, with the privilege of exemption from personal service, on the condition of finding a substitute. Does any man dream after this, that it is possible for Great Britain to have an army? The hope is utterly childish. The recruiting of the British army has, as every body knows, long stood still. An army not recruited must, by degrees, waste away. In spite of all the hopes, which some may indulge of transferring men hereafter by new bounties from the force thus raised to the regular army a most uncertain and ineligible method the army must unavoid

ably stand still for the present, and one may venture to say, under the influence of such a system, is not likely to be again put in motion.

This, therefore, is my great, leading, and fundamental objection to this measure, that it destroys all hope, now and hereafter, of a force truly regularthat it completely cuts up the army. This it effects, not so much by the raising of so many men—a measure which at the present moment I am not prepared to object to; but, by admitting the principle of substitution. That a compulsory levy cannot be made without a power of commutation of some sort or other, I am ready to allow. The grievance would be utterly intolerable. But I hoped, as the Hon. Gentleman knows, that another mode might have been adopted, namely, that of commutation of service for a fixed fine; which fine should be paid not into the hands of the corps for the purpose of being laid out in providing a substitute, with all the effect which such an additional demand must have in raising the rate of the bounty, but should be paid to Government, to be employed by them in any way they should think proper, or, if you choose to give it an appropriation, for the providing a recruit for the army. The great point is to abolish the present competition, under which it is impossible that the army can stand; and with this view, my meaning would certainly be, not merely to abolish this competition so far as it would arise from the body now proposed to be raised, but universally for the whole of the militia, old or new. There should be no recruiting but for the army.