The Bay of Andierne is between 2 and 300 miles from the most western ports of England.

The head and front of our argument rests on our dates: we request that they may be borne in mind. We gather from them that the English government not only entertained the intention of waging war against France previous to the issue of any notification, but that our ministers, bond fide, put their resolves into effect, and, whilst apparently at peace with the French republic, laid violent hands both upon French property and French citizens.

Admiral Cornwallis set sail from Torbay on the 16th of May. In the relative position in which France and England stood at this period, the act of leaving port was an act of aggression; it may be compared to that of an army passing the frontiers of the state to which it owes allegiance: the first day's march might not bring the host in the presence of any force capable of arresting its progress; but if it should, would not bloodshed instantly be the consequence ? Lord Cornwallis, neither in the second nor third hour of his sail, fell in with the French fleet, but if he had met the naval force of France on the 16th, he would have engaged it, or at least he would have so manœuvred as to produce a better chance of success for the following day; yet, on the 16th of May, Lord Whitworth was still in France, Ge

neral Andreossi was still in England, and the Privy Council, although it had determined on war, had not yet issued the proclamation which constituted the two countries enemies here, then, was one act of hostility committed during peace.

We proceed to another:-On the 19th of May the French had two vessels taken by the English, in the Bay of Andierne. This bay is, as any person may see who will consult a chart, between two and three hundred miles from the most western point of Great Britain. Plymouth is one of our most western ports; on the 17th of May, however, our cruizers off Plymouth, it seems, did not know that hostilities had broken out; on the 18th they were apprised of the war. Now we will not say that it is impossible for a ship to reach the Bay of Andierne, from Plymouth, in four and twenty hours, because a hurricane might, peradventure, blow her into that quarter, but we do say it is an improbability amounting almost to an impossibility; and, under this conviction, we hold that the vessels lost by France, on the 19th of May, in the Bay of Andierne, must either have been lost to her through the captains of the British cruizers having proceeded without due authority from their government, or from these captains having received, before the declaration of war, sealed orders

from their superiors, which authorized offensive operations on the 19th of May. The first of the suppositions no person will support; for British commanders do not take upon themselves to decide on the delicate and important question of when and where to begin national contests; the second only, therefore, can have been the case, and we do pronounce the measure to be wholly at variance with every principle of equity and fair fighting, because, so long as one government is at peace with another, neither has a right to frame or devise any scheme, or issue any orders, by which the future destruction of its confederate may be achieved; the planning or drawing up of such orders being acts, not of concord and harmony, but of violence and warfare, and the more dangerous in as much as, having a prospective effect, they, under the mask of friendship, may, and mostly do, inflict an injury which cannot be foreseen, and consequently cannot be averted. We shall close our examples with one further instance of the Punic faith shown by England.

On the 16th of May the King attached his signature to the declaration of war against France; on the 17th, this document appeared in the Gazettes; yet on the 15th—that is, one day before the war was decided upon, and two days before the public knew of the misfortune which awaited them, the thunderbolt of destruction had already

fallen on many an unsuspecting foreigner. At Portsmouth an embargo had been laid over all French vessels, and that property and those crews which were free on the 14th of May were now free no longer. We have been told that the French ships taken possession of on the 15th of May were not captured, but were only placed under embargo; contemptible subterfuge, as if the name of embargo could at all disguise the real complexion of the system adopted. England, we repeat, was not at war on the 15th of May: the war had not been at that date finally determined; the King had not, on the 15th, given his signature to

It may not be amiss to produce a specimen of one of the embargos with which England has chosen to commence her wars; we select that of 1755-6.

The French inveighed against the capture of their vessels before any declaration of war, as flagrant acts of piracy, and some neutral powers, amongst them the Dutch, seemed to consider the subject in the same point of view. The merchant ships, of which about three hundred had been taken, were not sold and divided, but sequestered, with all their effects, in order to be restored to the owners in event of no open rupture. In this particular it was a pity that a little common sense had not been blended with the proceedings; great part of the cargoes consisted of fish and other perishable commodities, which were left to rot, and were afterwards thrown overboard to prevent contagion, so that the value of them was completely lost to all parties. Immediately after the declaration of war, the ships, with what remained of their cargoes,

the instrument which placed France and England in enmity to each other; the ambassadors of the two states were still in those countries to which they had been sent as harbingers of peace*, and yet already, it never can be too often related, were there French prisoners and French property within the realm of England, incarcerated, and locked up by order of the British government. It was urged at the time, it has been urged since, that this barbarous conduct of England accorded with her general customt; it did, but custom does not invariably make law: to be law, a custom must be undisputed, but this custom of seizing ships be. fore declaring war has ever been disputed by fo

were tried and condemned as legal prizes, and their value, amounting to a large sum, was lodged in the Bank.-History of England, vol. 5. p. 111 to 189, Smollet. Our worthy author could have been no sinecurist;-with peculiar naïveté he concludes his account by observing that he never had been able to discover in what way the money arising from the sale of the French ships was disposed of. Poor Smollet! Was there no summer fly about St. James' to tell him how the droits of admiralty are expended!

*The act of an ambassador quitting the state to which he is delegated does not necessarily imply a commencement of war. We have lately seen the northern powers withdraw their ambassadors from Spain, yet no hostilities followed either on their parts or on the side of Ferdinand VII.

† Memorandum of two Conversations between the Emperor Napoleon and Viscount Ebrington, p. 24.