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when the voice of the country put them both out of power. I am sure that your lordship and your colleagues, especially your distinguished colleague now at Vienna, would scorn to purchase traitors in any country; but if you were so disposed, if such men as the famous captain HENRY could possibly prevail on you to lay out any of our money, in this way, on the other side of the Atlantic, such men, though so much applauded in the Times newspaper, would not be worth your purchasing.

This is the sort of stuff; this is the rubbish, which the Times would have us rely upon, for success against the republic! I beseech your lordship to consider it as it is, the grossest deception that ever was attempted to be palmed upon mankind. Mr. Madison cannot silence these men. He has no sops. He has none of that potent drug, of the possession of which, Smollet tells us, sir Robert Walpole used to boast. They will, therefore, keep on barking; but, my lord, be assured, that they are wholly unable to bite.

I am, &c.

WM. COBBETT.

LETTER VI.

TO THE EARL OF LIVERPOOL, ON THE AMERICAN WAR

MY LORD-It has all along been my wish to see England at peace with America.-My reasons for this I have often explained; and the mode I have pursued has been this: to endeavour to prove, that the grounds of hope of success, held out to us by such writers as the WALTERS, are fallacious. The division of the states, the impeachment of Mr. Madison, the resistance of taxation, and the various other grounds of hope, I have endeavoured to show were hollow, as much as was the expectation of sweeping the ocean of the "half a dozen of fir frigates, with bits of striped bunting at their mast heads."-The task of counteracting these delusive hopes has increased in arduousness with the progress of the war. Beaten out of one hope, these writers have resorted to others; and, as was the case in the last American war, pride and shame and revenge are mustered up to prolong a war which policy has abandoned.

There is now a new delusion on foot. Mr. Walter, the proprietor of the Times newspaper, who (shocking to think of!) has been a principal actor in producing this calamitous war, is now endeavouring to persuade the public, that the president of America will be unable to raise the force voted by congress, to complete the regular army of that great re

public to 100,000 men, by way of ballot, or what Mr. Walter calls CONSCRIPTION. To be sure, this is a measure very well calculated to astound such a man as Mr. Walter, who knows nothing at all about the people of America; who receives all his information through the very worst of all possible channels; who appears to be extremely ignorant himself; who publishes purely for gain; who desires to flatter the follies and prejudices of his readers; and who, finding himself the gainer by being the avowed enemy of freedom, in every part of the world, has become, to say nothing of his breeding up, a mortal foe to the American government and people. Such a man, who had been led to suppose, that the defence of a country, like America, was inconsistent with freedom, naturally relied upon the overthrow of the government, the moment it attempted to raise an army to resist its invaders; such a man would naturally be, as he has been, almost smothered in the foam of his own malignity, upon seeing a measure like this coolly proposed by Mr. Monroe, (now secretary of war) attentively considered by a committee of congress, and smoothly passing into a law, made, or to be made, by the real and not the sham representatives of a free people, elected by that people only a few months before, and knowing that they are again to be elected or rejected by that same people a few months afterwards. This has astounded Mr. Walter. It has, apparently, given his brain a shock too rude for its powers of resistance. It has upset all his calculations; and he is now crying out for a rebellion in America as fiercely as he ever cried out for bullets, bayonets, halters, and gibbets for the rebels in Ireland; but, never losing sight of his old object, namely, to delude this nation into the hope that the measure must

fail, and that, therefore, we ought to continue the

war.

Despicable, therefore, as this writer may be ; contemptible as is his stock of understanding; mean and malignant as may be his motives, his efforts merit attention, and call upon us to counteract them without loss of time. In doing this, I must first take the best account I can find of this grand measure of the American government, to which has been given the name of conscription. The following is the report of the bill as published by Mr. Walter himself.

[Here follows an analysis, of the bill as reported by the military committee, on Mr. Mónroe's plan.]

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Such is the measure which Mr. Walter assures us cannot be carried into effect; but says, that if it could be carried into effect, would deprive us of Canada in less than a year, unless we sent out our great national hero" and, indeed, that, under the bare possibility of such a measure's succeeding, "we ought to cast aside all European politics." What a change, my lord! This foolish gentleman used to tell us that the Americans would be "reduced," as the old phrase was, in "a few weeks.” He has often exhausted all his powers of speech to convince his readers that this enemy was too despicable to be treated with in the same sort of way that we treat with other nations. There is no expression of contempt contained in our copious language, which he did not use towards America and her president. And this same foolish Mr. Walter now tells us, that so great is this same America, that, in order to meet her with a chance of success, we ought "to cast aside all European politics."

I beg your lordship, now, to have the patience to read Mr. Walter's remarks, at full length, upon this

measure of defence in America. The article is of consequence; because, though coming from such a source, though proceeding from a son or sons of OLD WALTER, of regency memory, it is what will give the cue to almost all the rich people in the metropolis, and to not a few of those in the country. After inserting this article, I will endeavour to show its folly and its malice; and, were the author any other than a Walter, I should not be afraid to promise to make him hide his head for shame.

"No certain or official account of the rupture of the negociations at Ghent has yet reached this country. Private letters, it is true, have been received, stating that the American commissioner, Mr. Adams, was about to set off for St. Petersburgh, and that Mr. Gallatin had proposed that a single individual on each side should be left at Ghent to take advantage of any opening for renewing the negociation; but both these statements are at variance with those contained in other letters of the latest date from Ghent, received by the French mail of yesterday, according to which the diplomatic intercourse still continued. We repeat, that we do not think this the point to which the public attention ought to be directed. We should look not to the fallacious terms of an artful negociation; but to the infallible evidence of our enemy's mind and intentions displayed in his conduct. The bill for a conscription of the whole American population is a measure that cannot be mistaken. While such a bill is in progress, and before it is known whether the people will submit to its being carried into execution, it would be madness to expect a peace.→→ It would be madness to expect a peace with persons who have made up their minds to propose so desperate a measure to their countrymen: for either

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