sell more muslin?  Is it that we may acquire more territory?  Is it that we may strengthen what we have already acquired?  No; nothing of all this; but that one set of Irishmen may torture another set of Irishmen—­that Sir Phelim O’Callaghan may continue to whip Sir Toby M’Tackle, his next door neighbour, and continue to ravish his Catholic daughters; and these are the measures which the honest and consistent Secretary supports; and this is the Secretary whose genius in the estimation of Brother Abraham is to extinguish the genius of Bonaparte.  Pompey was killed by a slave, Goliath smitten by a stripling.  Pyrrhus died by the hand of a woman; tremble, thou great Gaul, from whose head an armed Minerva leaps forth in the hour of danger; tremble, thou scourge of God, a pleasant man is come out against thee, and thou shall be laid low by a joker of jokes, and he shall talk his pleasant talk against thee, and thou shall be no more!

You tell me, in spite of all this parade of sea-coast, Bonaparte has neither ships nor sailors:  but this is a mistake.  He has not ships and sailors to contest the empire of the seas with Great Britain, but there remains quite sufficient of the navies of France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark, for these short excursions and invasions.  Do you think, too, that Bonaparte does not add to his navy every year?  Do you suppose, with all Europe at his feet, that he can find any difficulty in obtaining timber, and that money will not procure for him any quantity of naval stores he may want?  The mere machine, the empty ship, he can build as well, and as quickly, as you can; and though he may not find enough of practised sailors to man large fighting-fleets—­it is not possible to conceive that he can want sailors for such sort of purposes as I have stated.  He is at present the despotic monarch of above twenty thousand miles of sea-coast, and yet you suppose he cannot procure sailors for the invasion of Ireland.  Believe, if you please, that such a fleet met at sea by any number of our ships at all comparable to them in point of force, would be immediately taken, let it be so; I count nothing upon their power of resistance, only upon their power of escaping unobserved.  If experience has taught us anything, it is the impossibility of perpetual blockades.  The instances are innumerable, during the course of this war, where whole fleets have sailed in and out of harbour, in spite of every vigilance used to prevent it.  I shall only mention those cases where Ireland is concerned.  In December, 1796, seven ships of the line, and ten transports, reached Bantry Bay from Brest, without having seen an English ship in their passage.  It blew a storm when they were off shore, and therefore England still continues to be an independent kingdom.  You will observe that at the very time the French fleet sailed out of Brest Harbour, Admiral Colpoys was cruising off there with a powerful squadron, and still, from the particular circumstances of the weather, found