desolation as that which yawned in the midst of those countries, to the
north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They
would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would
have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every
shilling derived from the producing to reanimate the powers of the
unproductive parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty,
whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity,
they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors, whose crimes
were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance,--that they
must silence their inauspicious tongues,--that they must hold off their
profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have
proclaimed, with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every
country the first creditor is the plough,--that this original,
indefeasible claim supersedes every other demand.

This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said.
This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or
doing. A ministry of another kind would have first improved the country,
and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future
force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country there
is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers,
from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by
fire, sword, and famine: their sympathies took another direction; they
were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless
itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long
missed the harvest of its returning months;[40] they felt for
peculation, which had been for so many years raking in the dust of an
empty treasury; they were melted into compassion for rapine and
oppression, licking their dry, parched, unbloody jaws. These were the
objects of their solicitude. These were the necessities for which they