But Mr. Cobbett was in favour of this measure! Listen to him! By all means! Let us hear Mr. Cobbett; let us hear his “vigorous sentences,” his opinions, his proofs, his arguments, the overflowings of his “true English spirit and feeling” upon the subject of Mr. Perceval’s administration. Yes! yes! I will listen to Mr. Cobbett, and what is more, I will yield implicit belief to Mr. Cobbett, where I cannot, with any feeling of truth, refute his arguments and assertions. Mr. Cobbett defended the Jesuit’s bark bill upon the avowed ground that it was to assert our sovereignty of the seas, not our actual power on that element, but our right to rule there as we listed. That is to say, that the other people of the world were not to dare traffic, not to dare move upon that high road of nations, not to presume to push their commercial intercourse with each other, nay, not even to communicate save under the controul and with the license of England. Now, if we are endowed by Heaven with such a right, in the name of all that is patriotic and English, let it be maintained. Yet it seems a strange plea in justification of the christian Mr. Perceval—it seems strange that he should be applauded for prohibiting the use of bark to the sick people of Portugal and Spain, and France, Holland, Flanders, Italy, and the Ionian islands, for to all these countries the prohibition extended, on the ground of our right to domineer on the wide sea; and that he should also be applauded for declaiming against the cruelty, the ambition, the domineering spirit of Napoleon. I suppose we were appointed by heaven to rule on the ocean according to our caprice, and Napoleon had only the devil to sanction his power over the continent. We were christians, “truly British christians,” as the Tory phrase goes; and he was an infidel, a Corsican infidel. Nevertheless we joined together, each under our different dispensations, yes, we joined together, we agreed to trample upon the rest of the world; and that trade, which we would not allow to neutrals, we, by mutual licenses, carried on ourselves, until it was discovered that the sick wanted bark, sorely wanted it; then we, the truly British christians, prohibited that article. We deprived the sick people of the succour of bark; and without any imputation on our christianity, no doubt because the tenets of our faith permit us to be merciless to our enemies, provided a quaker winks at the act! Truly the logic, the justice, and the christianity of this position, seem to be on a par.