Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

From the Belfast News-Letter of May 7.

THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES.

When the French Revolution commenced in 1789, there were few honest men who did not wish it success, or did not augur from it the downfall of superstition, and the restoration of genuine Christianity, combined with the triumph of Liberty. How HAVE OUR HOPES BEEN REALIZED? RELIGION, laughed at, a trumpet representing the Goddess of Reason in one of their most solemn festivals—the public adoration of the Living God heard of no more—and churches converted into places of show and merriment. At length the great Robespierre rises; and after such acts of tyranny as were never before represented on the theatre of this world, makes a public proclamation to his impious subjects, that "There is a God."

Has LIBERTY fared a better fate than Religion? No.—Look at this same Robespierre lording it over twenty five millions of men; and making human blood flow as it were for sport. Within the last two years see more printing presses put down in a week than were silenced in England or Ireland for one hundred years. See the banishment of Directors, and Representatives returned by the people, without a specific charge, a hearing, a trial, or a conviction. Approach near to the present day, and find them in Holland, stripping the merchants and workmen of every shilling that remained in their drained purses to pay armies whose conquests were to redound solely to the benefit of France and Frenchmen. See the poor, happy, and once termed free Swiss—over-run without shadow of cause, by these pretenders to liberty, or slavery; and every Swiss within this month, by public proclamation, doomed for execution, who shall not march against the enemy of France. Trace them in Venice, entering that city as friend and ally, to every inhabitant in which they promised Liberty and Equality, and declare that they came as their deliverers. Follow them to a cessation of hostilities between France and Germany, and then behold them tumbling that proud city as so much trash into the scale of the Emperor, like a cash payment for a debt.

Wherever they go you find them confounding true principles of freedom with the false, exciting the poor against the rich, and ruining both poor and rich, by the never failing consequences that follow to every country they enter to wit, the destruction of trade and manufactures, and the impoverishment of every class in the community. Hence beggared Holland, late the richest and most industrious port on the globe; hence desolated Netherlands, once the finest country in the world; and hence enslaved Switzerland, for centuries past the nurse of Liberty, and as much Equality as ever existed among men.

After all our hopes from that Revolution, which was to give lasting peace and liberty to the universe, the following is their character, too justly pourtrayed by Mr. Tierney in the British House of Commons, the most strenuous and keen member in the opposition. Even Mr. Tierney informs us, "there may be some difference of opinion upon the best and the worst form of Government; but I cannot (says he) conceive that any man who has any love of Liberty, can say anything for that wretched thing called THE Government of France."