Note 6 — CONTENTS. (continued 3)

While these pages were printing, the Common Council of London, the second deliberative assembly in the empire, have presented an address to the Throne, in which they describe the late devastating Wars as “RASH AND RUINOUS, UNJUSTLY COMMENCED, AND PERTINACIOUSLY PERSISTED IN, WHEN NO RATIONAL OBJECT WAS TO BE OBTAINED;” and they add, that “IMMENSE SUBSIDIES WERE GRANTED TO FOREIGN POWERS TO DEFEND THEIR OWN TERRITORIES, OR TO COMMIT AGGRESSIONS ON THOSE OF THEIR NEIGHBOURS.” No friend of Truth could wish to see a more correct historical record of these melancholy events; and, whether the authors of them are allowed to drop into the grave by the course of nature, or should expiate their offences on a scaffold, there is not likely to be much difference of opinion about them in the year THREE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED and SIXTEEN. Perhaps FIVE MILLIONS of men, and as many women and children, have fallen victims, in the space of twenty-five years, to attempts, as visionary as wicked, to destroy by the sword the assertion of Principles of Political Justice, which necessarily grew out of the cultivation of reason, and which were corollaries of that INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY of which Bacon laid the foundation, and which has been matured by Selden, Coke, Milton, Sidney, Locke, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Rousseau, D’alembert, Hume, De Lolme, Mirabeau, and Fox. Rights of social man derived from such sources cannot be overwhelmed, though a divided people may have been overpowered, though hated dynasties may have been restored, and though Popery, the order of Jesuits, and the Holy Inquisition, may for a season have resumed their ascendency. Return