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turn loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties, and religion, endeared to us by every tie that should sanctify humanity.

My Lords, this awful subject, so important to our honor, our Constitution, and our religion, demands the most solemn and effectual inquiry. And I again call upon your Lordships, and the united powers of the State, to examine it thoroughly and decisively, and to stamp upon it an indelible stigma of the public abhorrence. And I again implore those holy prelates of our religion to do away these iniquities from among us. Let them perform a lustration; let them purify this House, and this country, from this sin.

My Lords, I am old and weak, and at present unable to say more; but my feelings and indignation were too strong to have said less. I could not have slept this night in my bed, nor reposed my head on my pillow, without giving this vent to my eternal abhorrence of such preposterous and enormous principles.

The warning voice was heard in vain. Chatham's urgent anxiety was not enough to carry his amendment. It was lost by a vote of 97 to 24. The address triumphed; Parliament

adjourned; the members went to their Christmas festivities; the treaty with France was framed and ratified; and the chance of recovering the colonies was lost forever. Chatham did not live till the end of the war, but as soon as he learned that the treaty with France was signed, he knew that the fatal result was inevitable.

LORD MANSFIELD.

THE most formidable rival and opponent of Lord Chatham was William Murray, known in history as Lord Mansfield. In point of native talent it would not be easy to determine which had the advantage; but it is generally conceded that Mansfield's mind was the more carefully trained, and that his memory was the more fully enriched with the stores of knowledge. He was preeminently a lawyer and a lover of the classics; but Lord Campbell speaks of his familiarity with modern history as "astounding and even appalling, for it produces a painful consciousness of inferiority, and creates remorse for time misspent." His career is one of the most extraordinary examples in English history of an unquestioning acceptance of the stern conditions of the highest success.

Mansfield's education was characterized by a phenominal devotion to some of the severer kinds of intellectual drudgery. Though he was fourth son of Lord Stormont and brother of Lord Dunbar, the Secretary of the Pretender, he seems from the first to have been fully conscious that he must rely for distinction upon his own efforts alone. When he was but fourteen he had become so familiar with the Latin language that he wrote and spoke it "with accuracy and ease," and in after-life he declared that there was not one of the orations of Cicero which he had not, while at Oxford, written into English, and after an interval, according to the best of his ability, re-translated into Latin. Leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-two he was entered as a student of law at Lincoln's Inn in 1727. Lord Campbell says of him: When he was admitted to the bar in 1730, he had made himself acquainted not only with the international law, but with the codes of all the the most civilized nations, ancient and modern; he was an elegant classical scholar; he was

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