Star.
London, England, 1818-07-18 00:00:00

R. CANNING.

The followirg is the Speech of Mr. Casten:a, delivered to the
Elettnibi,of Liverpool, on his health being drank ; and to
which Sir FRANCIS Himont, made such frequent allusion in
his Lst Address to his Cunstituents at the Crownand Anchor:

" Gentlemen, six years have elapsed since I was
first placed in my present enviable situa.ion. Search
the recorjs.of history, where shall we find six yews
so fertile is events; and in events not only of 'such
immense importance, but of such various character,
at one time so awful and appalling, at another so full
of encouragement and of glory ? We have, within
this period of time, had war, peace—war again. and
again a peace, which, I flatter myself, in now settling
'itself for a long duration. In many of those changes,
Gentle,nea' as they were taking place, and with re-
spect to all of them, while they were yet in doubtful
futurity, the opinions which I hold with you, and by
holding which with you I am alone worthy to repre-
sent you, have been controverted by predictions,
which, in prospect, it would have been presumptuous
to dispute, but which, in retrospect, it is now pleasant
to contemplate. When I first, in obedience to your
call, presented myself before you, it was in that pe-
riod of a war, already of nearly twenty years duration,.
in which the crisis of the fate of nations seemed to be
arrived. It was at that period of the campaign, des.
tined to be decisive of that war, in which the enemy
appeared in his most gigantic dimensions, and had
begun to run his most extravagant career. It would
belittle disparagement to the stoutest heart to say,
that it shrunk from the contemplation of a might so
overwhelming? and it required perhaps as much cou-
rage as sagacity to derive 'from the ill-compounded
materials of the colossus a hope or expectation of its fall.
—We were, indeed, loudly told, at that time, that
resistance was altogether hopeless; and you, Gentle-
men, were encouraged to believe, that if, by rejecting
me, whoa: politics were supposed to be identified with
the prosecution of the war, and by returning to Par-
liament as your Representatives those who then soli-,
cited your suffrages in opposition to me, you would
mark your disapprobation of the continuance of so
hopeless a contest, you would, by this demonstration
of the opinion of so considerable a part of the British
Empire, infallibly produce a peace, a ith all its at-
tendant blessings. Against these fallacious but in—
• viting assn: antes, with all the responsibility that be-
longed so the anticipation of brighter prospects in the
midst of overwhelming gloom, and to the deniat,of
associations familiar in the mouths and in the minds
of men, I ventured to tell you, that peace was not in
,your power, except through the road of victory ; and
I ventured to tell you further, that peace, if sought
through any other path, would not be lasting, and
that come when it might, it would not come, in the first
instance, with all the blessings of ordinary peace in its
train., At the end of the period which has elapsed,
compare what I then said to you widt what has ac-
tually taken place. If, at the time of which lam
speaking in Ist% this great town had contributed
its she towards forcing a change in the National
Councils, by rejecting the man whose political exis-
' tence was identities-I with the success of the war, and
by choosing others in his room whose reputation de-
pended upon its failure ; and if, Gentlemen, you had
ha.l the misfortune t•s succeed in forcing such a
change; I ask you, whether you believe that England
would have stood erect, as she has done, with her
enemy prostrate at her feet, and with Europe saved
.by her as.istance ?—(Shouts of " No, no, no!")-
131 e, Gentlemen, as if to defeat and discredit the
professors of political prophecy, you have had also a
trial of peace, not wholly corresponding with their
anticipations. I told you in 1812, that nothing was
easier than to draw flattering views of distant pros-
pects ; but that there were circumstances to be taken
into account in the estimate of war and peace which
baffled calculation. I told you, that the war (not the
stir generally, as has falsely been itnpated, but the
war) in which we were then engaged was, from its
peculiar character, one in which, though the common
characteristics of peace, such as tranquillity, and ab-
scence of bloodshed, and freedom from alarm, were
necessarily suspended, yet the springs of enterprise
were not cut off, nor fhe activity of commerce alto-
gether paralysed. Nor would tile restoration of peace
necessarily and at once restott the state of things
which so long and so extraordinary a war had interrup-
ted. And why, Gentlemen? Because I was desirous,
as. was, I say, falsely imputed to me, of' dissociating
the natural combinations of war and peace from their
respective attributes? of holding out war as, for its
own sake, desirable, and peace as, in itself, unlovely?
i%lo, Gentlemen, but because I wished to represent to
you things as they really were, or, at least, as in my
own honest judgment I saw them ; because I wished
• to dissipate the prejudices which were attempted to
be raised against a war on the issue of which our na-
tional existence depended, by pressing inte the ser-
viea those common-place arguments against war,
which, however abstractedly true, were not true as to
the war in question ; and by holding out all those
. common-place inducements to peace, which, though
also nue in the abstract, could net have been true of
'any peace concluded on ignominious terms, and have
not been found true of the first years of a peace sue•
ceeding to a war of such unexampled effort and pro-
traction. That the war had had the effect of opening
unusual channels at commercial enterprise: that it
had given a new and extraordinary stimulus to com-
mercial activity and enterprise ; that the war had
created—l do not say a wholesome—l de not say a
substantial-1 do not say' a permanent—prosperity ;
but that it had created .t prosperity peculiar to itself,
• and which atoned, in some measure, for its evils, and'
enabled the country, in some measure, to bear up
a:ainst the difficulties incident to war ;—all these
were matters of fact, which, as such I stated to yuu ;
aad stated them a.; affording not motives, but conso-
lations—not inducements, to prolong, beyond neces-
sity, a war which might be safely terminated at will,
-but reasons for bearing patiently evils to Which it
was not in our passer to put an end. That this was
a !breed and unnatural state of things, neither I nor
dry man pretended to deny :—Lut whether we altine
c-ti,ll enjoy a sound and natural repose, in the forced
and unnatural state of Europe;—whether any peace
which could be made by us while all Europe re-
mained under the controul of our enemy, would be a
race worthy of the name,—this was a rpleaion
which might fairly be mooted,—without depreciating
th..biessings of peace, or denying the gem,* pre-
teraoseness of peace to war. Our adversaries repro