The Gazette

MISCELLANY.

ELEGANT EXTRACT.

The celebrated Mr. Burke's opinion of the People of New England, in one of his Speeches, delivered in the British Parliament in the year 1775.

"As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value: for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit with which that enterprising employment has been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay, and Davis's Straits: whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition. It is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them, than the accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coasts of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dextrous and fan-like civility of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which this has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not hardened in the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government, but that through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us. I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me."