ng the short
space of your life, England has been spared from the horrors of invasion,
which might with ease have been effected during the American war, when
the enemy's fleet swept the Channel, and insulted your very ports, and
which was more than once seriously intended during the late long contest.
The invaders would indeed have found their graves in that soil which they
came to subdue: but before they could have been overcome, the atrocious
threat of Buonaparte's general might have been in great part realised,
that though he could not answer for effecting the conquest of England, he
would engage to destroy its prosperity for a century to come. You have
been spared from that chastisement. You have escaped also from the
imminent danger of peace with a military tyrant, which would inevitably
have led to invasion, when he should have been ready to undertake and
accomplish that great object of his ambition, and you must have been
least prepared and least able to resist him. But if the seeds of civil
war should at this time be quickening among you--if your soil is
everywhere sown with the dragon's teeth, and the fatal crop be at this
hour ready to spring up--the impending evil will be a hundredfold more
terrible than those which have been averted; and you will have cause to
perceive and acknowledge, that the wrath has been suspended only that it
may fall the heavier!"

"May God avert this also!" I exclaimed.

"As for famine," he pursued, "that curse will always follow in the train
of war: and even now the public tranquillity of England is fearfully
dependent upon the seasons. And touching pestilence, you fancy
yourselves secure, because the plague has not appeared among you for the
last hundred and fifty years: a portion of time, which long as it may
seem when compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing
in the physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is
as possible now as it was in former times: and were it once imported, do
you suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded population
of your metropolis, than it did before the fire, or that it would not
reach parts of the country which were never infected in any former
visitation? On the contrary, its ravages would be more general and more
tremendous, for it would inevitably be carried everywhere. Your
provincial cities have doubled and trebled in size; and in London itself,
great part of the population is as