482 The Political State of [Nov. 



pects of peace, that throws a shadow to the furthest horizon; that 

 threatens to eclipse every kingdom, by the mere course of nature, as its 

 shadow sweeps round ; and compels every friend of the independence of 

 nations to look upon every addition to its height with an ominous feeling 

 of dismay. 



It is idle to ask at what time those residts will be realized ? a year, a 

 dozen years, are a moment in the history of nations. It would scarcely 

 relieve our alarm, if we were to be told that they would not be visited on 

 our country till we were in that slumber which the rise and fall of em[)ires 

 would disturb in vain. It is enough for the patriot and the chi-istian to 

 know, that such things will be ; he feels no relief in the chance of per- 

 sonal escape from the shock that covers his grave with the ruins of all 

 that he was bound in life to honour and to love ; he weeps for his country ; 

 he bleeds with every wound of his children. 



But the progress of Russia has been hitherto of such swiftness, that the 

 consummation may outstrip even the step of mortality. Within half a 

 century she has possessed herself of dominions half the size of Europe. 

 She has tripled her population, and with an invincible security in her 

 deserts, her climate and her population, she has advanced on every fron- 

 tier into the finest territories of the Asiatic and European world. In the 

 north, the Russian standard waves from the Baltic to the sea of Japan ; 

 In the west it sweeps Poland ; in the east the Persian empire hourly 

 shrinks before it ; and now in the south it has been planted at the gates 

 of Constantinople. And will it stop there ? — The policy which might 

 determine an European power to peace, has never been the policy of 

 Russia. Always to conquer, and add territory to territory, has been her 

 maxim. It has been imposed upon her government by the habits of her 

 people, and the nature of their soil. The Russian is of the Tartar blood : 

 the old spirit of rapine, the love of seeking a more propitious climate, the 

 passion for the fierce delights and lavish luxuries of military triumph, the 

 " gloria cruenta luxu.iquc pugnce" have been the incentives of his ances- 

 tors to rove from the wall of China to the furthest limits of Greece and 

 Italy ; and the same barbarian impulse which rolled the tide of the Hun, ' 

 and the Calmuck on Athens and Rome, will urge the subjects of the Czar ' 

 down, tribe after tiibe, upon the opulent cities and rich landscape of the 

 southern world. There was still one grand obstacle : the Ottoman lay in 

 the way, like the dragon of the Hesperides, a power whose resistance was 

 less to be measured by its actual sti-ength, than by its fierceness. Its 

 force was in its vigilance and its venom ; there it lay, a startling but bril- 

 liant combination of subtlety, splendour and poison, repulsive to every 

 feeling of man, but sustained for its fierce, untameable guardianship of 

 what every nation felt to be the secret of human supremacy. 



This guardianship is at an end. The Mediterranean is open to Russia ; 

 the single impediment to an ambition as boundless as the earth, and as 

 devouring as the grave, has been broken away; and that it has been thus 

 broken is the exclusive crime, as it must speedily be the condign punish- 

 ment, of England. 



We utterly disdain the imputation of canting, or bringing religion 

 into affairs with which it may have no concern ; when we pronounce on 

 our most solemn conviction, that this crime is the almost direct conse- 

 quence of another crime, whose deep offence has scarcely passed the lips 

 of the English legislature, — the annulling of our covenant with God as a 

 Protestant peoi)le. 



