land? some wild, uncultivated spot, where yet no arts had flourished, no civilization been spread, no benefits reciprocated? no religion known? Where novelty was the only passport, and where kindness was the short-lived offspring of curiosity? Unhappy men! to have struck on such inhospitable shores, amidst a race so unapprized of all social, all relative ties, as to confer favours only where they may be expected in return, unconscious, or unreflecting that every unoffending man is a brother!

"Or—were they thrown on some bleak northern strand, where life is mere existence, where the genial board has never welcomed the wearied traveller, where freezing cold benumbs even the soft affections of the heart, and where, from the first great law of self-preservation, compassion is monopolized by internal penury and want? Ill-fated passengers! it was not here, in the chill atmosphere of personal misery, your woes should have sought redress; the commiseration which is your due can only be conceived by those who have known the height from which ye have fallen, who have enjoyed the same affluence, and blessed Heaven for similar peace and joy—"

But no; this, at least, has not been their doom—nor will this, I trust, be their fate. No land of barbarians has been insensible to their worth, no ruthless region of the north has blighted sensibility for their misfortunes from ignorance of milder life: the land to which they sailed was Great Britain; in the fulness of its felicity, in the meridian of its glory, not more celebrated for arts and arms, than beloved for indulgent benevolence, and admired for munificence of liberality.

Here, then, ye reverend fathers, blest at least in the choice of your asylum, here rest your weary limbs, till the wicked cease from troubling! secure of the kindest, and, when once your exigency is known, the most effectual succour. Calm, therefore, your harrassed spirits, repose your shattered frames, look around you with fearless reliance; you will see a friend in every beholder, you will find a sympathizer in every auditor.

It ought also, to be remembered, that though the money now gathered will be paid into foreign hands, it is wholly among ourselves it will be expended; it is all and entirely our own by immediate circulation.

Yet—were it not—what is it but a refined species of usury? a hoard lodged beyond all reach of bankruptcy? a store for futurity? exempt from the numerous losses and disappointments of those who mistake the blessing of wealth to consist in its power of selfish appropriation?

Whoever bestows, whether promptly from impulse, or maturely from principle, will alike be content with the recompence of doing good: but in justice, in delicacy to the uncommon objects of this unexampled contribution, we should suggest what cannot fail to pass in their own minds, and anticipate what we cannot doubt will be the result of their restored powers: that those who survive the anarchy by which they are desolated, who live to see their country rescued from its present despotic tyrants, will still be strangers to repose, even at the natal home for which now every earthly sigh is heard, till, with their restituted property, they have cleared their dignity of character from every possible aspersion of calumny, and returned—not to their benefactors—whose accounts, far more nobly, will be settled elsewhere!——but to the poor of the kingdom at large, that bounty which has sustained them in banishment and woe.

Who is there that can look forward without emotion to the period of their recal and departure? With what blessings and what prayers will their hearts overflow! "Farewell, they will cry, ye friends of the unhappy! ye protectors of the houseless! ye generous rich, who thus benignly have worked