570 England, Russia, and Turkey. [June, 
stretching from the Black Sea to the Pole, and from Finland to the wall 
of China, is longing for the fatal marshes of Wallachia and Moldavia ; 
for the desarts of Romelia, and the sovereignty of the fiercest race of 
barbarians on earth, alien by their creed, alien by their habits, and 
cursing the ground that has been defiled by the tread of a Russian. 
With two capitals already hostile to each other, she is struggling for a 
third, incurably and furiously hostile to both. With an extent of 
dominion that no single sceptre can adequately rule, and which a few 
years will see either torn asunder by the violence of rebellion, or falling 
in pieces by the natural changes of overgrown territory, she is at this 
hour marshalling her utmost strength, and laying up debility for many 
a year, in the franitic eagerness to add the Turkish empire to the Musco- . 
vite, the Siberian, and the Tartar. 
And in this tremendous chase of power, what is to be trampled under 
the foot of the furious and guilty pursuer! The heart sickens at the 
reckless waste of life and the means of life, the myriads that must perish 
in the field, the more miserable myriads that must perish of disease, 
famine, and the elements let loose upon their naked heads ; the still 
deeper wretchedness of those lonely and deserted multitudes, whose 
havoc makes no display in bulletins and gazettes, but whose history is 
registered where the eternal eye of justice and vengeance alone reads— 
- the innumerable host of the widow and the orphan. Yet this weight of 
calamity is let fall upon mankind at the word of a single individual:— 
often the most worthless of human beings, an empty, gaudy, ignorant 
slave of alternate indolence and sensuality ; trained by the habitual life 
of foreign courts to thesperpetual indulgence of personal excess, and dif- 
fering trom the contemptible race generated by the habits of foreign life, 
only by his being the more open dupe of sycophancy, the more promi- 
nent object of public alarm, and the more unbridled example of every 
profligacy that can debase the individual, or demoralize the nation. Such 
are the mysteries of Providence—such is the unaccountable system o 
which the fates of millions are given into the hands of incapacity, vanity, 
and corruption ! 
In this merciless and guilty spirit of accumulation, Russia has beenffo1 
the last fifty years, the great criminal of Europe. Other powers 
been forced into war by situation; and success has almost 
them to an increase of territory. Revolutionary Fran¢e was 
its violence was no more to be reasoned upon than 
madness. Imperial France was forced, by the charagtet 
and extraordinary being on her throne and the fantastic "re 
her own nature, into conquest ; but the conquest was unsubstantia 
dominion of the ancient sovereigns was but slightly shaken, and the 
ebb of French victory disclosed the land again with all its native thr 
the first open act of that course of perfidy and blood, w) 
to overwhelm his own kingdom in the common ruin of 
Frederick, Joseph, and Catherine, were the three gran 
against the Law of Nations—the three impugners of that 
