I am thoroughly satisfied, that, if we degrade ourselves, it is the degradation which will subject us to the yoke of necessity, and not that it is necessity which has brought on our degradation.  In this same chaos, where light and darkness are struggling together, the open subscription of last year, with all its circumstances, must have given us no little glimmering of hope:  not (as I have heard it was vainly discoursed) that the loan could prove a crutch to a lame negotiation abroad, and that the whiff and wind of it must at once have disposed the enemies of all tranquillity to a desire for peace.  Judging on the face of facts, if on them it had any effect at all, it had the direct contrary effect; for very soon after the loan became public at Paris, the negotiation ended, and our ambassador was ignominiously expelled.  My view of this was different:  I liked the loan, not from the influence which it might have on the enemy, but on account of the temper which it indicated in our own people.  This alone is a consideration of any importance; because all calculation formed upon a supposed relation of the habitudes of others to our own, under the present circumstances, is weak and fallacious.  The adversary must be judged, not by what we are, or by what we wish him to be, but by what we must know he actually is:  unless we choose to shut our eyes and our ears to the uniform tenor of all his discourses, and to his uniform course in all his actions.  We may be deluded; but we cannot pretend that we have been disappointed.  The old rule of Ne te quaesiveris extra is a precept as available in policy as it is in morals.  Let us leave off speculating upon the disposition and the wants of the enemy.  Let us descend into our own bosoms; let us ask ourselves what are our duties, and what are our means of discharging them.  In what heart are you at home?  How far may an English minister confide in the affections, in the confidence, in the force of an English people?  What does he find us, when he puts us to the proof of what English interest and English honor demand?  It is as furnishing an answer to these questions that I consider the circumstances of the loan.  The effect on the enemy is not in what he may speculate on our resources, but in what he shall feel from our arms.

The circumstances of the loan have proved beyond a doubt three capital points, which, if they are properly used, may be advantageous to the future liberty and happiness of mankind.  In the first place, the loan demonstrates, in regard to instrumental resources, the competency of this kingdom to the assertion of the common cause, and to the maintenance and superintendence of that which it is its duty and its glory to hold and to watch over,—­the balance of power throughout the Christian world.  Secondly, it brings to light what, under the most discouraging appearances, I always reckoned on:  that, with its ancient physical force, not only unimpaired, but augmented, its ancient spirit is still alive in the