so we should be traitors, not only to our country, but to our kind—the worst species of treason to our country. It is curious that the ‘deepest enmity which the French people have drawn down upon them by their early struggles in the same cause, should be shewn by that government who had long insulted the slavery of Europe by the loudness of its boasts of freedom.’ We do not know how it is, but so it has happened, that in the thirty years of war which have graced the annals of the present reign, there has been a considerable want of sympathy between the crown and the people, as if the quarrel were merely the cause of kings, in which the people had no concern. Has this circumstance arisen from any unpleasant sense of obligation, or consciousness of a little irregularity and deviation from the right line in the descent of the crown, no more accounted for in Mr. Burke’s Reflections, than the declination of atoms in Epicurus’s philosophy? The restoration of the Bourbons in France will be the re-establishment of the principles of the Stuarts in this country.[16] PRINCE MAURICE’S PARROT OR, FRENCH INSTRUCTIONS TO A BRITISH PLENIPOTENTIARY _Sept. 18, 1814._ 1. That the French people were so deeply implicated in the Slave trade, as not even to know that it had been abolished by this country. 2. That the French press had been so long under the complete despotic control of Bonaparte, that the present government must despair of making any immediate impression on the independence of the political opinions, or the energetic firmness of the individual feelings of the people, lately consigned to their protection. 3. That such were their blind and rooted prejudices against the English, that we could only hope to convince them of our entire sincerity and disinterestedness in abolishing the Slave Trade ourselves, by lending a helping hand to its revival by others. 4. That if we consented to give up our colonial conquests to the French, on conditions dictated only by the general principles of humanity, this would be a proof that we intended to keep them in our hands from the most base and mercenary motives. 5. That the French government simply wished to begin the Slave Trade again as the easiest way of leaving it off, that so they might combine the experiment of its gradual restoration with that of its gradual abolition, and, by giving the people an interest in it, more effectually wean their affections from it. 6. That it is highly honourable in us to have proposed, and in the French to have agreed to, the abolition of the Slave Trade, at the end of five years, though it would have been insulting in us to have proposed, and degrading in them to have submitted to, any stipulation on the subject. 7. That to rob and murder on the coast of Africa is among the internal rights of legislation and domestic privileges of every European and Christian state.