"When Great Britain fell, the case would not be with her as with Rome in former times. When Rome fell, she fell by the weight of her own vices. The inhabitants were so corrupted and degraded, as to be unworthy of a continuance of prosperity, and incapable to enjoy the blessings of liberty; their minds were bent to the state in which a reverse of fortune placed them. But when Great Britain falls, she will fall with a people full of private worth and virtue; she will be ruined by the profligacy of the governors, and the security of her inhabitants,--the consequence of those pernicious doctrines which have taught her to place a false confidence in her strength and freedom, and not to look with distrust and apprehension to the misconduct and corruption of those to whom she has trusted the management of her resources." To this might have been added, that when Great Britain falls, it will not be from either ignorance of her rights, or insensibility to their value, but from that want of energy to assert them which a high state of civilization produces. The love of ease that luxury brings along with it,--the selfish and compromising spirit, in which the members of a polished society countenance each other, and which reverses the principle of patriotism, by sacrificing public interests to private ones,--the substitution of intellectual for moral excitement, and the repression of enthusiasm by fastidiousness and ridicule,--these are among the causes that undermine a people,--that corrupt in the very act of enlightening them; till they become, what a French writer calls "_esprits exigeans et caracteres complaisans_," and the period in which their rights are best understood may be that in which they most easily surrender them. It is, indeed, with the advanced age of free States, as with that of individuals,--they improve in the theory of their existence as they grow unfit for the practice of it; till, at last, deceiving themselves with the semblance of rights gone by, and refining upon the forms of their institutions after they have lost the substance, they smoothly sink into slavery, with the lessons of liberty on their lips. Besides the Treason and Sedition Bills, the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act was another of the momentous questions which, in this as well as the preceding Session, were chosen as points of assault by Mr. Sheridan, and contested with a vigor and reiteration of attack, which, though unavailing against the massy majorities of the Minister, yet told upon public opinion so as to turn even defeats to account.