The Reign of George III. (Continued.) page 14

He particularly haunted, in 1778, his native coast of Galloway, as knowing it well. He made a dash into the mouth of the Dee, near Kirkcudbright, and plundered the house of the earl of Selkirk, his father's former employer, carrying off all his plate and other: valuable property. He next fell on Whitehaven, where he spiked the guns, and burnt some vessels in the harbour. He continued to prowl along the coast between the Sol way Firth and the Clyde, without any man-of-war offering to check his career, and kept the whole country there in terror, the memory of which remains to the present day. As winter approached, he returned to Brest, with two hundred prisoners and much plunder.

In the summer of the present year (1779) he appeared at the head of a small squadron, consisting of three large ships, a brig, and a cutter. These ships, except the Alliance, an American one, were all French, and Jones bore a French commission. He now sailed along the eastern coast of England and Scotland, just as unmolested as he had done on the western in the former summer. He lay in wait for the Baltic fleet, and fell in with it off the Yorkshire coast, convoyed only by the Serapis, of forty guns, captain Pearson, and the Countess of Scarborough, of twenty guns, captain Piercy.

Warned by the mayor of Scarborough of the suspicious- looking craft, captain Pearson ordered all the merchantmen into the harbour of Scarborough, and awaited the coming up of the hostile squadron. In a terrible action, which lasted from eight o'clock in the evening till half-past ten of the 23rd of September, the Serapis was engaged with Paul Jones's ship, the Bon Homme Richard, and the American frigate, Alliance, the Alliance sailing round and raking the Serapis till almost every man on the main or quarter decks was killed. Captain Pearson, having suffered from an explosion on board from some of his gunpowder, which blew up all the officers and men abaft the main-mast, and the main-mast itself going by the board, was compelled to strike, but not till he had killed three-fourths of Jones's crew, and so battered his vessel that it sank. Captain Piercy was, meanwhile, as desperately engaged with the three other vessels of different sizes, and was, finally, also compelled to strike, having greatly damaged his opponents. The merchantmen all escaped; and Jones, on returning to France, was honoured with the order of merit and the gift of a gold-hilted sword, by Louis XVI., and afterwards received a vote of thanks from congress, and the appointment to the command of a new ship, the America. This was the crowning point of Jones's life. He was made a lion of in the polished circles of Paris, where he is said to have carried himself better than might have been expected from his education, and was regarded as a poet as well as a hero. But, being invited by Russia into her service, with the rank of rear-admiral, he was disappointed in not receiving the command of the fleet acting against the Turks in the Black Sea, grew discontented, and was dismissed with a pension that was never paid. He returned to Paris, and died there in poverty in 1792.

Some other sea conflicts took place about this time, most of them in favour of England; and the East India Company presented to government three fine seventy-four gun- ships, and offered bounty-money for raising six thousand men. It is clear, however, that the coasts of the island must have been badly watched whilst Jones for two summers could thus prowl about unmolested.

The effect of "the American war, so extremely unsatisfactory to the nation, had now perceptibly reduced the influence of lord North and his ministry. Their majorities, which had formerly been four to one, had now fallen to less than two to one; and this process was going rapidly on. The changes in the cabinet had been considerable, but they had not contributed to re-invigorate it. The removal of Thurlow to the house of lords had left nobody equal to him in the commons to contend with the power of such men as Fox, Burke, Barre, and the like. Wedderburn had taken Thurlow's place as attorney-general, and Wallace had stepped into Wedderburn's as solicitor-general. Lord Weymouth, who had held the posts of secretary of state for both north and south departments since the death of the earl of Suffolk, now resigned, and lord Hillsborough was appointed to the southern department, and lord Stormont to that of the northern department. Neither of these were popular changes. Hillsborough was a hasty man, of no great talent; and lord Stormont, though superior to him, had shown so little acuteness while ambassador at Paris, as to let the court completely keep him in the dark as to its intrigues with America. On this account he was intensely unpopular. Lord Carlisle, since his return from his American commission, had taken the office of first lord of trade and plantations; and lord Gower had resigned his post of lord- president of the council, and was succeeded by lord Bathurst - a change, in point of efficiency, greatly for the worse. The duke of Bedford's party had become more and more cool towards lord North, and in every respect there was a declining power in the cabinet. It was at variance in itself, and it was fast losing the confidence of the public. Lord George Germaine was still retained' by the king a? secretary of the colonies, notwithstanding the disgust he had excited by the unfortunate planning of the expedition of Burgoyne. This was a fatality in the king, that, however deficient in management were men, once in his employment, he would retain them, spite of the strongest expressions of the public displeasure. He still retained Palliser, though the public saw their favourite, Keppel, induced to resign in consequence of Palliser's behaviour towards him; and it is certain that no other king would have continued the administration of lord North, which had now for years resulted in nothing but one unbroken series of disaster, and at this moment presaged nothing less than the loss of the North American colonies.

On the 25th of November parliament was opened, and the king, in his speech, made a strong appeal to the country for support against the perfidious and unprovoked war on the part of France and Spain. He congratulated the nation on the manifest defeat, up to this time, of their armament and designs. Of America he, strangely enough, said not a word. But, indeed, what could be said? That war was dragging its slow and undecisive length along, and at the time when, as was immediately afterwards shown by the duke of Richmond, we had already spent sixty-three million pounds-, adding to the debt the interest of eight million pounds a-year, "we could scarcely be said to have an army there. Contending with a country on the verge of bankruptcy, where a vigorous force of thirty thousand men, under one able general, could tread out the last embers of contention in a few months, we were contenting ourselves with just beating off the half-starved, hordes of Washington. But on another discontented country, Ireland, his majesty was explicit. The discontents there, too, were so clamorous under this most deplorable reign, that rebellion was also menaced, unless some relaxation of the selfish policy of England was conceded, and George informed them that he had ordered the necessary papers to be laid before the commons, to enable them to decide what should be done.

The marquis of Rockingham, in moving an amendment on the address in the lords, was extremely severe. He described every part of our government, the management at home, our diplomacy abroad, the war everywhere, as conducted with an unexampled imbecility. He declared that lord Stormont had been most grossly duped by France, and lord Grantham by Spain. He referred to the expression in the address, of the happiness of living under his majesty's benign government, and declared that really it was insulting the common sense of the house; for that all our blessings, by the management of the king's government, had been converted into curses, and that security and honour were driven from the kingdom. He remembered, he said, the glory and lustre of the nation, when his majesty ascended the throne; but, since then, there had been a constant declension. The most pernicious counsels - the most unconstitutional tyranny - had prevailed. Never had this people, once so great, recently so great, fallen into such utter degradation. He expressed his astonishment that the ministers should dare to remain in office, after they had reduced the country to so deplorable a condition, and especially the lord at the head of the admiralty, lord Sandwich, when he had seen the oldest of our naval officers driven from the public service. He very justly upbraided them with the free license which Paul Jones had had to ravage and terrify our coasts. If he turned his gaze towards Ireland, nothing but discontent, excited by the grossest folly and the most absolute bad faith, met him. If he extended the survey to America, there he beheld the fruits of the same folly, the same tyranny, the same bad faith, ready to fall in rottenness and ruin. He especially condemned the menace of a new and terrible kind of warfare held out in the mischievous proclamation of the commissioners before leaving, which, he contended, had converted the contest there into one marked by every feature that was bloody, malignant, and diabolical. He concluded this bitter, but only too well deserved censure, by moving that every part of the address, except the title, should be expunged, and that, instead of what then stood, to insert a prayer, that his majesty would reflect on the extent of territory which marked the opening of his reign, the opulence and power, the reputation abroad, the concord at home, to which he had succeeded, and now on the endangered, impoverished, enfeebled, distracted, and even dismembered, state of the whole, after the enormous grants of his successive parliaments, and calling on him, as the only remedy of impending ruin, to dismiss his present evil councillors, and summon new and more auspicious ones.

The language was crushing, but it derived its force from its undeniable truth. Lord John Cavendish moved a similar amendment in the commons; and the opposition declared that it was well that his majesty's speech expressed trust in Divine Providence, for Providence was the only friend that his government had now left; that our arms, both on sea and land, were paralysed by the scandalous practice of putting at the head of the army and navy mere court favourites and aristocratic blockheads, and by the want of all vigour and sagacity of planning and following up our campaigns. Charles Fox went farther, and asserted that mere weakness and stupidity could not effect the wholesale shame and ruin that surrounded us; there must be treachery somewhere; and that, if this was driven a little farther, the people would seize on arms, and chase the miserable cabinet from its abused seat. Lord North made the best reply that the circumstances admitted; but there were no symptoms of the ministers resigning, or being removed by the infatuated monarch, and the amendments were rejected in both houses, as a matter of course.

During this debate, the state of Ireland had been repeatedly alluded to, and, on the 1st of December, the earl of Shelburne moved that the house should take into consideration the recommendation of his majesty regarding Ireland, of the 11th of May last. He censured ministers for their neglect of his recommendation, affirming that it was the settled conviction of all classes that nothing but the grant of an entirely free trade would remedy the evils of the sister island. Lord Gower, who had so lately resigned, opposed the motion, on the plea of giving ministers some time to answer the accusation, but confessing that, before quitting office, he had seen such things pass of late at the council- table, that no man of honour or conscience could any longer sit there!

Lord North, in the commons the same day, promised that the subject should have immediate attention; but, nothing being done, five days after, the earl of Upper - Ossory, sitting in that house, moved for a censure on ministers, on the same ground as lord Shelburne had done in the lords. Lord North, in reply, declared that ministers were the warmest friends that Ireland had had for a long time; that they had enlarged the trade of the Irish; they had given bounties to encourage the Irish Newfoundland fisheries, for the growth of tobacco and hemp; and had granted free exportation of woollen cloth, and other articles. Fox, who had been some time absent from the house, in consequence of a wound received in a duel with Mr. Adam, who had taken offence at some of his remarks on the first night of the session, supported lord Ossory's motion with all his eloquence; but it was rejected by one hundred and seventy- three votes against one hundred.

On the 13th of December, lord North, however, brought forward his promised scheme of Irish relief, which consisted in extending the exportation of woollen cloths to wool, and wool-flocks, to all kinds of glass manufactures, and in free trade to the British colonies - privileges that it seems wonderfully strange to us, at the present day, could ever have been withheld from any portion of the same empire. The critical state of America, no doubt, had much to do with the grant of these privileges, for all of them were conceded.

The ruinous expenditure of the war, and the continual difficulties into which the civil list had fallen, now roused throughout the country a strong demand for economical reform. It was notorious that the expenditure was not only lavish in every department of the state, but that numbers of men had got into parliament to enable them the more readily to secure contracts for the army and navy, which were most scandalously executed, to the great injury and discomfort of our soldiers and sailors. It was not only that our expenditure was greatly exaggerated by these means, but, as a natural consequence, the efficiency of our military and naval operations was destroyed. We did not procure our money's worth by any means. If our funds had not been corruptly expended, we could have maintained far more and better ships and regiments, and our men would have been better clothed and fed. It is by the influence and the villanies of this base brood of contractors that our service has always been infected, our arms paralysed, and our debt increased. It would make a fearful portion of the great debt if we could analyse it, and discover how many of its millions have gone into the pockets of contractors fraudulently. The contract for hats, clothes, and arms, in the American war, were described often in terms of extreme ridicule, but which were, in reality, no laughing matters to the nation. At no period did the abominations of this system flourish more fatally, whilst men, bloated by the national wealth, thus obtained, sate numerously in the house of commons, selling their votes to ministers for these unholy gains.