[Footnote M: A government, and particularly a monarchy or aristocracy, may be in the habitual practice of vice, while the people are in the habitual practice of virtue. In an aristocracy, where the army, navy, places, and pensions, are in the power of the few, the voice of the people has little or no influence. The genius, industry, and enterprise of the English, have converted a barren island into the most fruitful and beautiful spot on earth; their improvements in the useful arts, have made them the greatest and most useful manufacturing people that ever existed. In proportion as the people, by their industry, increased the riches of the nation, the government found a facility in raising revenue, and have loaded the virtuous people with taxes to the amount of twenty-five or more millions a year, to pay for ruinous wars, the conquest of America, the establishment of the Bourbons, and the balance of Europe.] I have now run this subject to a conclusion, in which I do not hesitate to say, that two thousand Torpedo boats and twenty-four thousand men, would take the command of the British channel from Boulogne to Romney, from Calais, Gravelines, Dunkirk and Ostend, to the mouth of the Thames, and that the command of the commerce of those narrow seas, would command the British nation; but there the power of Torpedo boats must cease--a nation cannot send such boats to sea to depredate on commerce, nor to foreign countries on expeditions of conquest, and therefore the seas must be free. ON _the imaginary inhumanity of Torpedo war_