and the consequences of the Treaty. In the course of this discussion, I shall attribute to your Lordship, no other responsibility, than that which you must necessarily assume. You have signed this Peace as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and as such, and such only, I address myself to you. Personality is entirely out of the question: it is the measure

itself

that act, was guilty of felony; that the officers at Dover apprehended him as being so guilty; that the threats of LAURISTON disarmed the law, in open violation of which LUNDBERG was brought to London, and taken back again to Dover and to Calais. These are the facts that are of importance, and none of these facts have been, or can be, denied. LORD TEMPLE, feeling, as every true Englishman must, the indelible disgrace cast on his country by this insult, asked LORD HAWKESBURY, in his place in the House of Commons, if there were any foundation in the report respecting LUNDBERG; to which he received no answer. It is well known, that this unparalleled indignity has been the subject of much conversation, and of as much discontent as the broken spirit of the nation can be expected to express: nor is this unknown to the Ministers, who, had they been able, would long ago have sent forth a public and explicit contradiction of my statement.-But, not to leave to inference the establishment of so important a fact, I again declare, that what I have stated respecting LUNDBERG is true, and for proof I can appeal to the records of the Alien Office, and, if necessary, to the affidavits, of persons at Dover.

1

itself that I dislike, and that I shall attack, and not its authors, whom I have hitherto highly respected, and who have, perhaps, in this instance, weakly sacrificed their own opinions to the ignorant clamours of the populace.

I am,

My LORD,

Your Lordship's most humble

and most obedient servant,

WM. COBBETT,

LETTER IV.

Pall-Mall, 19th Oct. 1801.

MY LORD,

In entering on an examination of the Peace, which your Lordship has signed, the attention of every Englishman is first naturally turned towards the Mediterranean, the theatre of our present warlike operations.

Four years ago, my Lord, we had not a single vessel floating on that sea, nor was there a single port open to us in the whole extent of its immense coasts. The enemy, on the contrary, who, by force, by terror, or by fraud, were become the absolute masters, not only of the waters, but of the surrounding shores and the islands, or of the humbled Powers, to whom they belonged, might, with no great impropriety, call it the French Sea. Our Continental Allies, disarmed by force or by fear, were all prostrate at the feet of the Republic. On this sea, as it were in its own home, we sought for the formidable and all-conquering foe, we found him, we attacked him, we fought him foot to foot.

Minorca

was

was the first fruit of our valour; with a fleet inferior both in number and strength, we destroyed the fleet of France; by a blockade of more than a year we became masters of an impregnable fortress, at once the best military and naval station in the Mediterranean, if not in the world; finally, in the course of one single campaign, the glory of which will, I am much afraid, my Lord, outlive Great-Britain herself, we rescued, from the fangs of the invaders, a whole kingdom, conquered and defended by a numerous army of their chosen troops. Porto Ferrajo, fortunately succoured by Admiral WARREN, must, in a few weeks, have been effectually relieved by a detachment from our victorious army in Egypt.

By this line of naval stations, all of them impregnable, all inaccessible to our enemy, Gibraltar, Mahon, Porto Ferrajo, and Malta, to which it would have been very easy to add Corfu or Alexandria, our brave countrymen, by land and sea (for the former have now shown that occasions only were wanting to exalt their fame to a level with that of the latter), had laid a solid foundation for the sway of Great-Britain, in that distant sea, so lately regarded as the patrimony of France; they had raised an insurmountable barrier between French

8

ambition

ambition and the territories of the Turk, as also between the plundering projects of the most daring of robbers, and our golden territory of the East; they had established for us an exclusive commerce with Turkey, and had bound that Power to England by the ties of gratitude and self-preservation; by our possession of Porto Ferrajo, the trade was entirely cut off between the western and eastern coasts of the French Republic (for, my Lord, all men of sense persist in regarding the farcical kingdom of Etruria, the states of the Church, and the Kingdom of Naples, as neither more nor less, than provinces of France); in short, the French were completely driven from the Mediterranean sea, and scarcely dared to risk a few miserable fishing smacks, even under the shelter of their batteries.

To preserve this Empire of the Mediterranean to the end of time, required, at most, only ten or twelve thousand men, judiciously distributed in the three or four posts above-mentioned, with a few ships of the line, accompanied by a proportionate number of frigates. Our gallant army, having expelled the enemy from Egypt, were at hand, and ready to take upon them the preservation of these valuable possessions, which, had they even been

open