cient degree of ministerial patronage. It was now evident that ministerial influence wished to go much farther; it extended even to persons out of place and in avowed opposition; for what paymaster out of office could be said to be independent of ministry till his accounts were passed? His right honourable friend, who began the debate, notwithstanding he was every way independent in principle and spirit, was indisputably dependent on ministers at that moment, and so he must remain till he could obtain his quietus; which rested altogether, or would rest altogether, after the bill passed, on the will of the noble lord in the blue ribbon, who had at once the power of quickening the passing the accounts of other accountants, just as he chose to exercise it either way. He put this argument into several shapes, and said, had his right honourable friend, the present paymaster, continued last year to entertain sentiments similar to those which he and his friends avowed, and which the right honourable gentleman seemed more than once inclined to adopt, he verily believed ministers would have attempted to have given him as much uneasiness as possible. He knew his right honourable friend was superior to their impotent malice; and indeed his favourable conduct since, with respect to ministers, had rendered it unnecessary. He said, that when he was himself examined before the commissioners, he thought it his duty to state, "that there was a litigation depending between the executors of Lord Holland and Mr. Robert Paris Taylor, who was one of his deputies, the determination of which might affect the balance due from the late Lord Holland, as paymaster of the forces; as much of that balance as might be affected by that litigation, he objected to the payment of into the Exchequer; as to the residue, he had no objection, upon obtaining a quietus, or an indemnification equivalent thereto." this declaration he was ready to abide, but to be obliged to give up the balance on any other condition, he should consider, as being forced by the strong hand of power to submit to an act at once oppressive, violent, cruel, and unjust. He contended also that the object was not worth the violence of the measure, for that in fact the noble lord was grasping at the mere interest of two hundred thousand pounds for a few months only, since, if Lord Holland's accounts were passed by Christmas, the whole of the balance would be paid at that time. Mr. Fox offered on the part of Lord Holland's representatives, that the whole balance should be paid into the bank, there to abide the passing of the accounts, and contended, that the public had no right to handle it until his father's representatives had obtained their quietus.

By

After some conversation, the House went into the committee.

MR. FOX'S MOTION FOR A COMMITTEE TO TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THE STATE OF THE AMERICAN WAR.

June 12.

AN account of the battle of Guildford, in North Carolina,

having appeared in the London Gazette, together with those subsequent events, by which it appeared that the victorious army had notwithstanding suffered the consequences of defeat, in being obliged to abandon the country, with all the objects of their entering it, and to retire to the sea-side, Mr. Fox thought this intelligence, so authenticated, afforded a proper foundation for bringing the business again forward. Accordingly, this day,

war.

Mr. Fox called the attention of the House to the American He began by observing, that this subject had undergone a recent discussion upon a motion made by his honourable friend, Colonel Hartley, in consideration of which he should not now have troubled the House with a proposition built on the same basis, but that since the late occasion an argument had presented itself more unanswerable in its nature, and more efficacious, as he had reason to hope, with gentlemen on the other side, than any thing that he or his honourable friend could advance: their assertions might be questioned, but those of Lord Cornwallis, he trusted, would have all the weight which the abilities, experience, and high professional reputation of that general might fairly challenge. He had a paper in his hand, the late gazette, from which, on the authority of Lord Cornwallis, the impracticability of conquering America was plainly deducible, and on that alone he meant to rest his argument that day, as the best means of avoiding those stale repetitions so often complained of, when the present subject came before parliament; the subject might be old, but the field of reasoning would now have an air of novelty. He should therefore confine himself entirely to the gazette; it was an authority to which gentlemen on the other side of the House would not object, and he begged the patience of the House would bear him company in giving it an attentive examination. This paper certainly confirmed every thing that had been advanced by his honourable friend and himself on the former occasion; but if it could be permitted him to be jocular on such a subject, he might beg the House to believe there was no collusion in the case, the gazette neither having been framed by his authority, nor he having had any previous knowledge of its contents.

He remembered well the principal argument urged from the opposite benches, and on which the debate chiefly hinged,

was a signal victory, which, said those gentlemen who op posed the motion of his honourable friend, will call the rebels to the British standard. The victory had since come confirmed; the British standard had been erected; but what then were the predicted fruits of what he was tempted to call this pretended victory? Nothing but disappointment; nothing but misfortune; he would not say public disgrace. The truth was, the victory of Guildford, as it was called, drew after it all the consequences of something very nearly allied to a decisive defeat. Lord Cornwallis did not fly from the enemy; but indisputable facts bore him out in affirming, that if Lord Cornwallis had been vanquished, instead of being the temporary victor, his operations, or rather movements, could not have borne a more unfortunate aspect. He no longer pursued the object of his expedition; he no longer sought the enemy, even in their flight. Nay more, he in an instant relinquished all the advantages he had gained with so much difficulty; which had been attended with circumstances which reflected so much honour upon himself as a commander, and upon the very gallant, but ill-fated, body of men whom he led to glory, and to every thing but substantial

success.

From the report of Earl Cornwallis, there was the most conclusive evidence, that the war in which we were engaged was at once impracticable in its object and ruinous in its progress. It furnished us with the materials and grounds both of triumph and dejection, both of glory and despair. It shewed us, that beneath the conduct of that brave man, a body of British troops had acted up to all the expectations that could be formed of their enterprize and their valour; and at the same time taught us, that neither spirit nor perseverance, neither good conduct in the commander nor courage in the soldiery, could prevail in a contest founded in evident madness and inconsistency.

He wished, he said, to examine the information which we had received from Earl Cornwallis pretty closely. The noble lord said, "that the object of the campaign was to penetrate into North Carolina." This, surely, could not have been sufficient of itself to sanctify an expedition of so much certain expence and probable danger; and his lordship very properly gives the farther explanation in a subsequent passage, by saying, that "it was to give protection to the many loyalists that there were in North Carolina, and to bring them to the British standard." From whom his lordship received this information, he could not pretend to guess; but most likely from this country, where all such information had its rise and currency. Undoubtedly, there was reason to apprehend that

ap

there might be some men in North Carolina, who, on the proach of his majesty's arms, might have joined them; for, previous to the present contest, there were a set of men in this province, a sort of banditti, who infested the peaceable inhabitants, and against whose depredations it had been found necessary to guard, by putting arms into the hands of a number of orderly persons, who were called regulators. To be sure, it was not altogether unreasonable to hope, but that these banditti, who had maintained a sort of intestine war against the old-established government of the province, might be expected to join those who came like themselves to attack that government. To men of such a description all government would be alike, and they would be ready to join any force whatever that came with hostile intentions against the settled power of the country. But even those expectations, if any such were formed, had been disappointed, and the whole object of the campaign had failed.

This failure, he said, must have proceeded from one of these three causes: first, that there must have been some essential defects in the plan; secondly, that the means must not have been adequate to the object; and thirdly, that there must have arisen certain unforeseen contingencies, applicable to this campaign only, which had defeated the end. As he could not for a moment suspect that either of the two former could be held up by government as the causes of our failure, in regard to themselves or to the commander, whose skill, enterprize, and perseverance, were justly praised, he could only have recourse to the last, as the only probable cause that could be urged by ministers of the calamities of the campaign. With this view, therefore, he would examine the contents of Earl Cornwallis's dispatches, to see if his information would bear ministers out in this argument. He here turned to the Gazette Extraordinary, and by commenting on every passage, he shewed the House that the obstacles were not temporary nor peculiar; they were not applicable only to this campaign, nor such as were either unforeseen or unexpected. They were obstacles incident to the nature of the war, and which we should always have to encounter and surmount, while the constitution of nature remained the same. They were the obstacles of rivers, of a deep intersected country, of impassable marshes, of a disaffected people, of "timid friends, and of inveterate enemies." Such was the state of the country, that he could not procure provisions for his small army, while that of General Green, so much more numerous, found no such want. Such was the state of that service, that he had not been able even to procure intelligence. So timid, as he expressed it, were the friends of government

in that country, (represented as so favourable, that they would be ready to flock to the royal standard on its approach,) that they would not even venture to give him intelligence, much less assistance; or only give him delusive and false intelligence, by which he might be led into situations dangerous and difficult for his army.

He made here a just distinction between the conduct of the friends of government in that country and this. There they were so timid, or rather treacherous, for that was the more applicable epithet, as to give no intelligence; here they were so audacious as to give us intelligence in immense quantities. They told us every thing. Such was the abundance of intelligence with which they furnished us, that they had hurried us on, from year to year, from effort to effort, from expence to expence, with an avidity which only could be equalled by the timidity and the silence of those friends whom they had left behind. He wished to God that those men, who had been so loquacious in England, had been in Carolina, where their loquacity would have been of service; and that those timid friends had been in England in their stead, by which we might have been preserved from all that torrent of intelligence which had influenced and hurried us into this war, and been provided with a little of it in the day of necessity, when information was necessary to safety, if not ta

success.

He proceeded next to the battle of Guildford, where the gazette asserted we had obtained a signal victory. This term, he doubted not, was used by Lord Cornwallis in a very proper sense, for he could only attend to the disproportion between the two armies; in which point of view, no doubt, that a victory should be gained on our side was very astonishing, and highly to the honour of our troops; but if the consequences of the action were to be regarded, then he must understand the word signal in a very different sense, and allow the victory to have been signalised by drawing after it the same identical effects that might have been expected from a defeat. Had our army been vanquished, what course could they have taken? Certainly, they would have abandoned the field of action, and flown for refuge to the sea-side: now these were precisely the measures we were obliged to adopt after the action at Guildford, the victorious army leaving the field, abandoning the future object of its expedition, and retiring to the fleet. Another term used by Lord Cornwallis, he must also take notice of; he called his army a little one; and well, indeed, might he give it that appellation, since his whole force did not amount at the utmost to 3,000 men. He took that number, merely to avoid a contradiction that might