Under these circumstances, under these prospects, coupled with this retrospect, what became the duty of all foreign politicians? of the English above all, as natural leaders in any hopeful scheme of resistance? The question can scarcely be put with decency. Time and season, place or considerations of party, all alike vanished before an elementary duty to the human race, which much transcended any duty of exclusive patriotism. Plant it, however, on that narrower basis, and the answer would have been the same for all centuries, and for every land under a corresponding state of circumstances. Of Napoleon's real purposes there cannot _now_ be any reasonable doubt. His confessions--and, in particular, his indirect revelations at St. Helena--have long since removed all demurs or scruples of scepticism. For England, therefore, as in relation to a man bent upon her ruin, all distinctions of party were annihilated--Whig and Tory were merged and swallowed up in the transcendent duties of patriots, Englishmen, lovers of liberty. Tories, _as_ Tories, had here no peculiar or separate duties--none which belonged to their separate creed in politics. Their duties were paramount; and their partisanship had here no application--was perfectly indifferent, and spoke neither this way nor that. In one respect only they had peculiar duties, and a peculiar responsibility; peculiar, however, not by any difference of quality, but in its supreme degree; the same duties which belonged to all, belonged to them by a heavier responsibility. And how, or why? Not _as_ Tories had they, or could they have, any functions at all applying to this occasion; it was as being then the ministerial party, as the party accidentally in power at the particular crisis: in _that_ character it was that they had any separate or higher degree of responsibility; otherwise, and as to the _kind_ of their duty apart from this degree, the Tories stood in the same circumstances as men of all other parties. To the Tories, however, as accidentally in possession of the supreme power, and wielding the national forces at that time, and directing their application--to them it was that the honour belonged of making a beginning: on them had devolved the privilege of opening and authorizing the dread crusade. How and in what spirit they acquitted themselves of that most enviable task--enviable for its sanctity, fearful for the difficulty of its adequate fulfilment--how they persevered, and whether, at any crisis, the direst and most ominous to the righteous cause, they faltered or gave sign of retreating--History will tell--History has already told. To the Whigs belonged the duty of seconding their old antagonists: and no wise man could have doubted that, in a case of transcendent patriotism, where none of those principles could possibly apply by which the two parties were divided and distinguished, the Whigs would be anxious to show that, for the interests of their common country,