Vetus says, that ‘eternal war is no expression of his, and that it is a deliberate falsehood in us who assert that he has used it, or that this country has no alternative between eternal war and eternal bondage.’ ‘It is not England,’ he says, ‘but France—not Vetus, but the French government—who has broached the creed, and one of the two countries must in the end destroy the other.’ If it is a falsehood, it is a deliberate one, for we do deliberately assert that he uses these words, and inculcates this doctrine incessantly. But instead of contradicting Vetus, it is better to let him contradict himself; no one else can do it so effectually. In his last letter but one he has these words:—‘It is, I conscientiously believe, a question, _which of these two countries shall destroy the other_. In that case my part is taken.—France must be ruined to save our native country from being ruined.—If this be perpetual war, I cannot help it.—Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens us.’ Either the interpretation of this passage is that which we have given to it, or, as Vetus says, ‘the English language must be constructed anew.’ He now, indeed, mitigates the dread sentence he had passed upon us, by saying, not that we have no alternative but either war, or slavery, or _peace_. We are glad that Vetus has introduced this new clause in our favour into the codicil; it was not in the original will, or expressed in such faint characters, that we, with the rest of the public, missed the intended benefaction. Just in the same manner, that profound politician and humane writer, the author of the Essay on Population, found out that the only possible checks to excessive population, were vice and misery, which were, therefore, to be considered as the greatest blessings of mankind, and having gained a vast reputation by this singular discovery, he then recollected what every one knew before, that there was another check to this principle, viz. _moral restraint_, and that consequently vice and misery were not the greatest blessings of society. We did not state it as an inconsistency in Vetus, that he held out _France_ as an object of terror, and yet recommended a negociation with Bonaparte, because his government tended to weaken France, but we did state it as a rank inconsistency in Vetus to hold up _Bonaparte_ as an object of peculiar terror to this country, and yet to represent his government as tottering on the brink of deplorable weakness and unavoidable ruin. Vetus could not meet the objection, and he has altered the terms. Vetus concludes his letter with the following note:—