establishment, the comparative thinness of her population, and the improving condition of her agriculture. The conduct of our present administration towards Britain is now examined; and at the very commencement of this inquiry, we are presented with the following spirited and masterly sketch of the state of Europe. "To estimate our political situation aright, it is necessary that we cast an inquiring look over the European world, the centre of all political motion; and I would address myself to the plain ununderstanding of my countrymen, to judge, whether or not we have nothing to fear from that over-grown, restless power, that now scourges, and oppresses the nations on the other side of the Atlantic? Can it be of no importance to American security that, in the hands of one single monarch, centre all the vast military power, all the prodigious resources of every kind, that come from the bosom of France;—all the navy, all the wealth, all the industy, that Holland did once so proudly boast ;—and all that Flanders, with her iron boundaries, and fortified provinces, and hardy soldiers, born, bred, and living, in camps, and garrisons, can add to these dangerous advantages?-Are we indifferent to the truth, that this same monarch has gained to his dominion the whole of Switzerland, and that all Italy is in his complete possession? And can we be still easy, and tranquil, under the reflection, that Spain is but one of his auxiliaries; and that all the wondrous wealth of her mines, all her vast American possessions, and the commanding and extensive line of her European coast, are, to all uses and effects, the property of Napoleon? And do we still sleep in sound slumbers, while he is stretching his iron arm over Germany, and creating kings, and unmaking emperors, and new-modelling every thing, that every thing may be prepared for his seizure? Is it nothing to the United States, that Spanish, Dutch, and French America, touching our boundaries, and lying by our shores, are, now, no longer, separated, and held by different powers, but all united property, managed and controlled by one single arm? Are we such wretched politicians, as to imagine, that all this gigantic power, animated by a vast genius, which knows no rule, but the earth-compassing ecliptic of his ambition, cannot, and will not if he be unchecked by some equal and jealous rival, cramp, grind, and tyrannize over America? Are we such miserable moralists, as to look for the sudden moderation, and satiated appetite of usurping ambition, and do we think, that its march will be stopped by any thing but unconquerable force? And do we know so little of the nature of man, as to suppose, that, imperial pride, exalted over Europe, will suffer American Independence to insult it with her lofty deportment ?"— Rely upon it, Americans, that the wide range of Napoleon's vision will rest, only, when it can take in the supreme command of all the extended relations of the universe. He is for change because change does away the old order of things, and kills the veneration, that institutions of long existence create in the human breast; which veneration for antiquity is a corroding reproach, against all his pomp and state, the work of modern intrusion. He abhors republics, because despotism is his trade; he detests republican America, knowing, that she once felt a yearning sympathy for republican France, which he has strangled to death; and because the rights and blessings, which we enjoy, as the off-spring of our liberty, are a satire upon his gloomy and Turkish dominion. We may be assured,—that the hyena, which has devoured the directories, the senates, and the consulates of France, eat up the burgesses of Switzerland, preyed upon the helpless king of the Sicilies, and mashed in his ravenous jaws the collective body of their High Mightinesses of Holland, will seize, in some future, unsuspecting moment, upon the fair goddess of American liberty, if we are not vigilant and wary, and unless the British lion confine him to his cadaverous range among the entombed empires of the continent-of Europe." The means both direct, and indirect, by force, and by fraud, which Napoleon has in his power, and doubtless in his will, to injure or to destroy the commerce of America, are pointed out with great force and precision; and Bonaparte's influence over our executive is proved, but too plainly, by numerous instances of the tame, the patient endurance, with which that executive has submitted to the frequent insults and exactions of the Emperor of the French. The purchase of Louisiana is shewn to be a poor, pitiful expedient of pedling policy; and the insecurity of the American tenure, in this newly-boughten territory is thus expressed, "The people of Louisiana are already French; and they would crowd in flocks, to the standard of their country, raised upon their shores. They are men of French habits, of French prejudices, accustomed to a foreign dominion, not yet reconciled to ours, because they derive, as yet, none of the advantages, that were promised to them from it; and they feel themselves degraded by the late transfer and sale of their persons and properties. They have been insulted by a magistrate put over them, without one conciliating, but with many repulsive properties, and one, whose studious business it seems to be, to alienate any little affection, that may rise in the bosoms of the Louisianians, for the American people, and their republican institutions.-Louisiana is, at this moment, if France chooses to seize upon it, her's without resistance.” (To be Continued.) EPISTLES, ODES, AND OTHER POEMS, by Thomas Moore, Esq.-Philadelphia: published by John Watts, 1806. 8vo. p. 306. THE HE experience of all ages proves, that women are either the guardians of their country's honour, or the sources of their country's death.—That, in proportion, as they faithfully discharge the great and the hallowed duties of daughter, sister, wife, and mother, do they produce, and rear, and form those children, who, in the fulness of their strength, and in the maturity of their manhood, will, as statesmen, as warriors, as divines, as lawyers, as artists, as merchants, as citizens, and as peasants, each, in his respective capacity, affirm and strengthen their native land, by upholding and preserving their own integrity and truth untarnished, and, above all, by bowing themselves down unto the earth before God, the Judge of all, through the divine Mediator, knowing their own strength, feeling their own infirmities, ever vigilant against their foes foreign and domestic;-and, having done all, still committing themselves, and their cause, to Him, who judgeth righteously; to Him, who holdeth the winds in the hollow of his hand; who rolleth the waters together, as they were a garment ;-who doeth according to his will amidst the armies of heaven; and, in whose sight, all the inhabitants of the earth are as-nothing,—as less than nothing: and that, in proportion, as the women of any country give themselves up to work unrighteousness; to disregard the moral and the social ties: to encourage the rejection and the dissolution of all religious obligation and principle, thereby preparing and disciplining the mind for the breaking up of every bond of established government, however just, and however reasonable ;--then are they the foul and the feculent sources of all those misshapen conceptions, all those political abortions, and all that horrible spawn of Jacobinism and infidelity, whose faithless machinations, and bloody deeds inevitably effect the disruption of all social order, and bury all human happiness, in one common grave of universal ruin, while the earth is bursting asunder, and hell is yawning from beneath. It is the firm, the unbending conviction of this sacred, this never-to-be-forgotten truth, which has made every wise and every good man, in all ages, and in all climes, labour, in the conflicting, convulsive agony of his soul, to fix the temple of female chastity, and female honour, upon a firm, and a lasting basis. It was the conviction of this truth, which made one, who had, indeed, drunken much too deeply into the deadly bowl of false philosophy, and revolutionary madness, endeavour to retrace his steps from the guilty gloom of a more than midnight darkness into the regions of the morning, and the light of the day. His name is now erased from the list of proscription, and he deservedly stands among the foremost of the children of his country's confidence, and his country's honour.-Let his words be listened to, with that attention, which his wisdom deserves, and his eloquence invites. "Almost all the relative duties of life will be found, more immediately, or more remotely, to arise out of the two great institutions of property and marriage. They adorn, preserve, and even constitute society. Upon their gradual improvement depends the progressive civilization of mankind; on them rests the whole order of civil life. We are told by Horace, that the first efforts of lawgivers to civilize men, consisted in strengthening and regulating these institutions, and fencing them round with rigorous penal laws. "Oppida cœperunt munire, et ponere leges, "A celebrated ancient orator, of whose poems we have but a few fragments remaining, has well described the order in which human society is gradually led to its highest improvements, under the guardianship of those laws, which secure property, and regulate marriage. Et leges sanctas docuit, et 'chara jugavit "Nothing can be more philosophical than the succession of ideas here presented by Calvus: for it is only, when the general security is maintained by the laws, and when the order of domestic life is fixed by marriage, that nations emerge from barbarism, proceed, by slow degrees, to cultivate science, to found empires, to build magnificent cities, and to cover the earth with all the splendid monuments of civilized art. These two great institutions con vert the selfish as well as the social passions of our nature into the firmest bands of a peaceable and orderly intercourse; they change the sources of discord, into principles of quiet; they discipline the most ungovernable, they refine the grossest, and they exalt the most sordid propensities; they become the perpetual fountain of all that strengthens, and preserves, and adorns society; they nourish the individual, and they perpetuate the race. As they were, at first, the sole authors of all civilization, so they must, for ever, continue its sole protectors. They, alone, make the society of man with his fellows delightful, or secure, or even tolerable. Every argument and example, every opinion and practice, which weakens their authority, tends also to dissolve the fellowship of the human race, to replunge men into that state of helpless ferocity, and to condemn the earth to that unproductive wildness, from which they were both originally raised, by the power of these sacred principles; which animate the activity of exertion, and yet mitigate the fierceness of contest; which move every plough, and feed every mouth, and regulate every household, and rear every child; which are the great nourishers, and guardians of the world. The enemy of these principles is the enemy of mankind.-Around these institutions all our social duties will be found, at various distances, to range themselves; some more near, obviously essential to the good order of human life; others more remote, and of which the necessity is not, at first view, so apparent; and some so distant, that their importance has been sometimes doubted, though upon more mature consideration, they, also, will appear to be out-posts and advanced guards of these two great fundamental principles; that man should securely enjoy, and freely transmit the fruits of his labour; and that the society of the sexes should be so wisely ordered, as to make it a school of the kind affections, and a fit nursery for the common-wealth." And let the sisters of the song lend to philosophy their effectual aid, in supporting the great cause of moral obligation. And, first, let Lucretius speak ;-for, even, Lucretius, that atheist of ancient times, surrounded as he was by the degrading licentiousness, and the corrupting superstitions of paganism, and darkened as he was by the gloomy horrors of unbelief, far surpassed, in political wisdom, all the way-ward spawn of infidelity in these our days ;-he well knew, that, without a strict regard to sound morals, no community could be long holden together ;-that unless the most sacred respect were paid to the connubial union, man would speedily go back from the blessings of social order, would soon be degraded to that level of ignorance and of barbarity, which characterizes the hordes, that are scorched upon Arabia's burning plains; and |