the Means of ruining England, than An Examination of the State of France.

fu

At any other period, fuch a production, though it might have been amusing to a very perficial politician, would hardly have excited the attention, much less required the anfwer, of a profound and enlightened writer. But it ap peared at a time when certain unfortunate and unfounded prejudices against this country were at their highest pitch; and it was craftily defigned to inflame that spirit of animofity which could alone give currency to its abfurdities. Upon these grounds it acquired a degree of popularity, fufficient to induce a Pruffian writer, whose talents have before been displayed in some excellent political works, to undertake the refutation of it.

The following is a tranflation of this reply of Profeffor Gentz to Citizen Hauterive: but had the German been only valuable as an answer to the French publication, I certainly should have fpared myself the pains of preparing it for the

English

English prefs. It would have been a very fuperfluous labour in a country where the pamphlet that gave rife to it, had excited neither admiration nor argument.

But the merits of Mr. Gentz's work are not confined to the controverfy before him. His State of Europe is fomething more than an occafional treatise: it has an independent and general character. And though the arguments and affertions of his adverfary are completely difpofed of, yet the ordinary spirit and defects of polemical writings have been carefully and judiciously avoided a circumftance which does him the more honour, as he had received what might be efteemed juft provocation from the French writer, who treated him without candour or respect in his allufions to fome of his former productions.

L'Etat de la France is one continued attack, direct or indirect, upon the rights and interefts, the credit and conduct, of Great Britain. No argument, no femblance of an argument, has been left untried to criminate her politics, and

7

to detract from her character. It is needlefs to anticipate Mr. Gentz's obfervations on this general scope of Hauterive's work; he has condescended to analyze fome of the charges against a nation to which he is himself a stranger; and nothing more is neceffary to confute them.

It was more immediately his province to vin dicate the law of nations against a writer who is a principal (because the organ of the French government) in a confpiracy to fubvert by fraud, what yet remains undemolished by force; and upon the ruins of the old to establish a new fys tem, in which an absolute fupremacy is to be conceded to France, while England is to be made to "refume her fation among nations of the fecond order." This Mr. Gentz has completely done; and at the fame time repelled a fingular attempt to afcribe the fins of France to the mifconduct of Europe, in a manner quite novel, and, I think, peculiar to this author of the eighth year.

From the moment when the prefent government had established itself upon the ruins of the

laft

last jacobinical authority, the principles andevents of the revolution were no longer themes of praise and admiration for the political writers of France. Liberty and equality had retired before the bayonets of Bonaparte's grenadiers; democratic tyranny had yielded to the genius and fortune of an aspiring foldier; and the admirers of the change could not celebrate the event without condemning the conduct of the great nation during the ten years that preceded it. Hauterive does not defend the revolution; on the contrary, he confiders it as an evil of the first magnitude; but his object is to prove that France is not responsible for the miferies thereby occafioned to Europe, but that Europe, on the contrary, is the guilty cause of all that France herself has suffered; and he labours to persuade us that the French revolution, with all its difaftrous confequences, was the fruit of the misconduct and corruption of the governments of other nations. Whether he has fucceeded, as he himself affumes, in his attempt to prove this extraordinary pofition, will be seen by the following work, in which Mr. Gentz has contradicted it by a very able

a 4

able and elaborate review of the State of Europe before the Revolution.

It may here be proper to make a few obfervations on a very principal part of Hauterive's book; because it involves a question of the highest import to this country, and because it is not difcuffed in the answer of Mr. Gentz, who has reserved it for a separate publication, a fequel to the prefent.

When the Etat de la France was produced by an Honourable and Learned Member of the House of Commons in his feat *, it was reprefented as aiming at the deftruction of the exifting relations of belligerent and neutral powers, and labouring to establish a system directly hoftile to the interefts of England, and contrary to the prefent law of nations.

The conteft which has been terminated fo honourably and fatisfactorily for Great Britain, after a ftruggle of near fifty years, will be a fubject of admiration to future ages, when it fhall

* Dr. Lawrence, on the 5th of March.

have