Berkeley And Jefferson Intelligencer

Extract of a letter from a Clergyman in England to his friend in America, in the year 1803.

If England has not greatly advanced from that period in prosperity, she must be verging fast to her declension. True it is she has nearly all her strength floating on the ocean, but though for the present she may oppress, yet it requires the means to keep such an armament (always as uncertain as the element on which she exists) in operation.

That the condition of Britain is critical and saddening unprecedented and awful, can be denied by those only who assist in heaping upon the community the accumulated evils under which it labours. That both abroad and at home the prospect is most gloomy, is sufficiently obvious to the sober eye of common sense, cleared from the films of prejudice and interest.

Abroad we behold our natural and inveterate foe extending her dominions from sea to sea; and, after having swallowed up our allies, after having bruised in pieces the nations around her, like a potter's vessel: after having bound their princes in chains, and their nobles in links of iron; after having put out the glory of half the monarchs in christendom, cast their thrones down to the ground, and laid their honours in the dust we behold her converting the power of our former friends into means of our present inconvenience, and future destruction.

At home, we perceive ourselves sinking under the pressure of an enormous debt, accumulating every successive year in a frightful ratio -- a debt, whose interest is with difficulty discharged by, all the various taxes and imposts that sagacity can suggest, or ingenuity devise. We see the arm of an irritated God revealed in the Heaven above, and in the earth beneath, in inclement skies and unproductive fields; and the haggard form of want (in consequence of this denial of accustomed blessings) striding thro' our towns and villages, and fixing her harpy talons on the most numerous and useful description of the community -- the sturdy peasant, the industrious mechanic and the humble tradesman; we see the cottage of the labourer, once the scene of comfort and content, now the residence of want and disconsolation: the dwelling of the active manufacturer, heretofore envied by animating competency, at present the seat of lifeless despondence, and heart chilling poverty ; we see modest want pining away in silent suffering, too feeble to dig and to beg ashamed ; unsolaced wanderers exposed to the rude tempests of the disordered elements, without a place whereon to lay their heads.

We see persevering industry, labouring with unceasing toil from the dawn of morning 'till the dark dusk of night, and still unable, by all his exertions, to procure for himself and his family (the nerves and sinews of the land, by whom alone we are clothed and fed) I will not say a comfortable maintenance, but a sufficiency of homely food; we see farther less unprotected children stretching out their little hands, and craving from a mother (widowed perchance by the ruthless sword of war) for that which she hath it not in her power to bestow for bread; and we hear (the inevitable result of this general scene of misery) the sullen murmur of discontent rolling through the land not loud indeed but deep, like the indistinct growling of the APPROACHING STORM.