conclude this masterly and accurate series. Here is the matador,
craving permission to kill the bull in honour of the municipality
of Seville: here he advances--his long four-edged sword, of more
than bayonet strength, firmly grasped in his right hand, whilst his
left waves the scarlet _muleta_, further exasperating the menaced
brute. Be it observed, that there is no "thrusting" in the case.
Rapier work were here of little avail. The sword is solid, stiff,
and heavy; it _receives_ the bull, but does not _meet_ him. Entering
between the shoulder and blade-bone, it is buried, by the victim's
own impetus, to the very hilt. Only by so profound and desperate
a wound could this energetic vitality be thus instantaneously
extinguished. When successful, skilful matadors will sometimes
withdraw the sword from the wound, and raise it in triumph above
their prostrate victim. On all occasions, a firm hand, great nerve,
and a quick eye, are essential. The bull is very often not killed by
the first thrust: if the sword strikes a bone, it is ejected high in
the air by the rising neck. When a bull will not run on the flag, he
is doomed to the dishonourable death of a traitor, and is houghed
from behind with a sharp steel crescent fixed on a long pole. When
the sinews of his hind legs are thus cruelly divided, the poor beast
crawls in agony, and squats down; then a butcher-like assistant, the
_cachetero_, creeps up, and pierces the spinal marrow with a pointed
dagger, which is the usual mode of slaughtering cattle in the
Spanish shambles. To perform any of these vile operations is beneath
the matador, who sometimes will kill such a bull by plunging the
point of his sword into the vertebræ. The great danger gives dignity
to this most difficult feat, _el descabellar_. If the exact spot be
hit, death is immediate; if the aim misses, and the animal's side
only is pricked, he dashes at the unprotected torero, and frequently
disables him.
Artists and authors travelling in Spain may, for some time to come,
give their brushes and pens a holiday, so far as bull-fights go.
There remains little that is new to be written or painted concerning
them. Every phase and incident of the contest has been correctly
seized and vividly portrayed by Mr Price, who has fairly exhausted
his subject. As regards description, that given by Mr Ford is
exactly what is needed to accompany an artistical work. It tells us
all that is wanted, and, in conjunction with the pictures, gives to
fire-side travellers as good an idea of what a bull-fight really
is, as can possibly be obtained without actually witnessing one. It
has not suited our purpose, in the present brief paper, to extend
our examination of "_Spain as it is_" beyond the fourth chapter of
the second volume; but it is only fair to say, lest it should be
supposed the merit of the book is also confined to that chapter,
that Mr Hoskins' volumes contain a mass of useful information and
clever criticism on the public and private picture-galleries of
Spain.
CUPID IN THE CABINET.
AN ATTIC LEGEND.
[The incidents upon which the following little poem is founded, are
amusingly related by John Lydgate, monk of Bury, who flourished
about the year 1430. Warton has done full justice to his poetical
genius; but his prose works, though comparatively less known,
deserve equal attention.
"I will tell you now of a plesaunt story recorded by Plotinus. One
daye a certaine man of the cytie of Athens going forthe into an olde
foreste, wherein was many dyuers of byrdes synging, did hear, nye
unto a brokken Tempill, that tyme afore was dedicat unto a hethen
Godde, a voice as of a yonge chylde that was carolying swetely. How
be it, the man knew not the tonge wherein the lyttel chylde did
synge. Astonied at thys maruyl, for the place was not nighe unto
the cytie, so that chylderne colde furthlie passe thereunto, he
looked ovir the walle, and soughte al aboute what this myght mene.
Than sawe he sytting amonge the herbes, a fayre yonge boie, with
winges besprent with fetheris, behynde his sholderis, and noghte
lyving thynge besyde. Than sayde he: 'What doest thow here, chylde?'
but the chylde answered noght, but smyled. Soe the man, being in
perplexitie, for he knew not what it mycht bee, yet lyking not to
leeve so yonge a chylde in the wodes, where wylde bestes were manie,
did have him up into his mantill, and convaied him home until his
awn duellynge. There, in defaulte of anie cage, he did putte the
chylde into an olde Cabynett, that afore tyme stode longe there,
and dyd give hym mete and drynke. Yet the chylde waxed not, but
sange contynuously, soe that al the pepill of Athens maruyled at
hys mynstrelsye. But what was grete wonder, the Cabynett wherein he
was, which afore was brast in dyuers places, wherein chinkis and
riftis dyd appere, semed to become of a sodaine newe and stronge,
and was couered with gemmis and jowellis of grete prys, yet colde
no man telle whens they did come. And the lyttel chylde had hys
duellynge there, lyke unto an byrdis neste, and dyde synge rychte
swetely, so that manie cam from afar to see the wonder. So dyd he
manie yeris. At the last, deceisit the master of the house, and he
that cam after hym loued nat musike, but was given up to thochtes of
merchaunsedyse, and was of an ille fauour, regardynge nocht but his
own gettynges. Soe one daye, heryng the chylde synge euer, he wox
angery, and did command hym to holde his pees. Howe be it the chylde
wolde nat. Than thys man, being wrothe, caused to bringe leveris,
and to brak open the Cabynett, and take forth the chylde, and to put
hym to the wyndowe. But the chylde sayd, 'Ye will curse the tyme
ye put me forth;' and with those wordes vanyshed the chylde away,
and was neuer sene a geyne. From that tyme the Cabynett was rent,
and fall asonder in peces, Dyuers were angery with the man for his
myssedede, but he sayd, 'The deuyll satysfye you, for I dyd it for
the beste; but I shall neuer more medyll.' And he dyd nat, but sone
after departed that cytie. And Plotinus sayth that thys chylde was
estemit to be Cupido, and so was called in hys daies."]
--LYDGATE'S _Boke of Tradycion_.
Pray you, gentle ladies, hearken
To a tale of ancient time:
Let no doubt your bosoms darken,
Love is always in his prime.
Young, and fair, and gladly singing
As he did in days of yore,
O'er the bright blue ocean winging
To the sweet Idalian shore.
Cupid is not dead, dear ladies!
You may hear him even now
At the early dawn of May-days,
Singing underneath the bough.
But beware, for he deceiveth;
Tempt him not within the door,
For the house that Cupid leaveth
Shall not prosper evermore.
Old Plotinus, now in glory,
Hath bequeathed to us a story,
Which perhaps may sound as new--
And 'tis neither long nor stupid--
Of a man who captured Cupid;
If you please, I'll tell it you.
Wandering through the forests wide,
Rising from Cephisus' side,
Went a stout Athenian Archon,
With a vacant listless eye,
Till he heard a little cry,
That made him stop and hearken.
From a ruined temple near,
Came a voice both soft and clear,
Singing in some foreign tongue
Sweeter strains than e'er were sung,
Till the birds forbore their call,
Wondering who the wight might be
That in forest minstrelsy
Overcame them, one and all.
Slowly went the Archon on--
Peered above the broken stone--
There, within the waste enclosure,
On a bed of myrtle wild,
Lay a little yearling child,
Who smiled and sung, and sung and smiled,
In innocent composure.
From his chubby shoulders, wings
Sprouted outwards; tender things,
Hardly fledged, as are the callow
Nestlings of the household swallow.
And the Archon, gazing there,
Thought that never child so fair
Had he looked on, anywhere.
"Whence art thou, my pretty boy?
But the infant nought replied,
Turning to the other side
With an unknown song of joy.
"Can it be," the Archon pondered,
"That some little god hath wandered
From his home within the skies,
To a dreary spot like this?
Ever welcome to the wise
Such a rare occasion is;
So within my cloak I'll fold him!"
Little trouble was to hold him--
Calm and still the infant lay,
Smiling ever, singing ever,
Till the Archon crossed the river
Just above Piræus' bay.
"In what place to lodge my darling!"
Mused the much-bewildered sage,
"He might dwell within a cage
Safe as any finch or starling;
But an infant god to hold,
All the wires should be of gold.
Ha! I see--the very thing!
This will give him room to play,
Yet so far restrain his wing
That he cannot fly away.
Therefore come, my pretty pet,
I'll put thee in my Cabinet!"
Crazy was that Cabinet
When he let the Cupid in,
Loosely were the joinings set
Both without it and within:
You had sworn in any weather
That it could not hold together
Longer than a year or so.
But no sooner was the god
Ushered to his new abode,
Than he wrought a change; for, lo!
Bright and fresh the place became,
Renovated in its frame.
With a lustre shone the wood
As it were from opal hewed;
And the vases twain, that stood
On its top, both cracked and grey,
Glistened with metallic ray,
As if golden jars were they.
Every thing grew bright and fair,
For the God of Love was there.
As a bird within a cage
So that it be tended well,
Careth not elsewhere to dwell;
Will not leave its hermitage,
Even for the wild and free
Chorus of the greenwood tree--
So the god, though famed for changing,
Never seemed to think of ranging.
Were the seasons dry or wet--
Rose the sun, or did it set--
Still he kept his Cabinet.
And he sang so loud and clear,
That the people clustered round
In the hope that they might hear
Something of that magic sound;
Though the words that Cupid sung
None could fathom, old nor young.
Sometimes, listening from afar,
You might catch a note of war,
Like the clarion's call; and often
Would his voice subside, and soften
To a tone of melancholy,
Ending in a long-drawn note,
Like that from Philomela's throat--
'Twas, "Proto-proto-proto-colly!"
But at last the Archon died,
And another filled his place--
He was a man of ancient race,
But jaundiced all with bitter pride,
Oppressed with jealousy and care;
Though quite unfitted to excel,
Whate'er the task, he could not bear
To see another do it well!
No soul had he for wanton strains,
Or strains indeed of any kind:
To nature he was deaf and blind,
His deepest thoughts were bent on drains.
Yet in his ear were ever ringing
The notes the little god was singing.
"Peace, peace! thou restless creature--peace!
I cannot bear that voice of thine--
'Tis not more dulcet, sure, than mine!--
From thy perpetual piping cease!
Why come the people here to hearken?
The asses, dolts! both dull and stupid!
Why listen to a silly Cupid,
Preferring him to me, their Archon?
Hush, sirrah, hush! and never more,
While I am here, presume to sing!"
Yet still, within the mystic door,
Was heard the rustling of the wing,
And notes of witching melancholy,
Called--"Proto-proto-proto-colly!"
In wrath the furious Archon rose--
"Bring levers here!" he loudly cried,
"If he must sing--though Pallas knows
His voice is tuneless as a crow's--
E'en let him sit and sing outside!"
They burst the door. The bird was caught,
And to the open window brought--
"Now get thee forth to wood or spray,
Thou tiresome, little, chattering jay!"
Paused the fair boy, ere yet he raised
His wing to take his flight;
And on the Archon's face he gazed,
As stars look on the night.
No woe was there--he only smiled,
As if in secret scorn,
And thus with human speech the child
Addressed the nobly born,--
"Farewell! You'll rue the moment yet
You drove me from your Cabinet!"
He sped away. And scarce the wind
Had borne him o'er the garden wall,
Ere a most hideous crash behind
Announced an unexpected fall.
The Cabinet was rent in twain!
The wood was broken into splinters,
As though for many hundred winters
It had been dashed by wind and rain.
Golden no more, the jars of clay
Were dull and cracked, and dingy grey.
Down fell a beam of rotten oak;
The chair beneath the Archon broke;
And all the furniture around
Appeared at once to be unsound.
Now have I nothing more to say!
Of Cupid's entrance all beware:
But if you chance to have him there,
'Tis always wise to let him stay.
And, ladies, do not sneer at me,
Or count my words without avail;
For in a little time you'll see
There _is_ a moral to my tale.
What has been done in days of yore
May well again be acted o'er,
And other things have been upset
By Cupid, than a Cabinet!
THE OLD SOLDIER.--IN THREE CAMPAIGNS.
BY THOMAS AIRD.
CAMPAIGN THE FIRST.
"Glory of War, my heart beat time to thee,
In my young day; but there--behold the end!"
The Old Soldier said: 'twas by his evening fire--
Winter the time: so saving, out he jerked
His wooden leg before him. With a look
Half comic, half pathetic, his grey head
Turned down askance, the pigtail out behind
Stiff with attention, saying nothing more,
He sat and eyed the horizontal peg.
Back home the stump he drew not, till with force
Disdainful deep into the slumbering fire
He struck the feruled toe, and poking roused
A cheery blaze, to light him at his work.
The unfinished skep is now upon his knee,
For June top-swarmers in his garden trim:
With twists of straw, and willow wattling thongs,
Crooning, he wrought. The ruddy flickering fire
Played on his eye-brow shag, and thin fresh cheek,
Touching his varying eye with many a gleam.
His cot behind, soldierly clean and neat,
Gave back the light from many a burnished point.
His simple supper o'er, he reads The Book;
Then loads and mounts his pipe, puffing it slow,
Musing on days of yore, and battles old,
And many a friend and comrade dead and gone,
And vital ones, boughs of himself, cut off
From his dispeopled side, naked and bare.
Puffs short and hurried, puff on puff, betray
His swelling heart: up starts the Man, to keep
The Woman down: forth from his door he eyes
The frosty heaven--the moon and all the stars.
"Peace be with hearts that watch!" thus, heaven forgot,
And all its hosts, true to the veins of blood,
Thoughtful his spirit runs:--"'Tis now the hour
When the lone matron, from her cottage door,
Looks for her spouse into the moonlit ways;
But hears no foot abroad in all the night.
Then turns she in: the tale of murder done,
In former days, by the blue forest's edge,
Which way he must return--why tarries he?--
Comes o'er her mind; up starting quick, she goes
To be assured that she has barred her door;
Then sits anew. Her little lamp of oil
Is all burnt out; the wasting embers whiten;
And the cat winks before the drowsy fire.
What sound was that? 'Tis but her own heart beating.
Up rises she again; her little ones
Are all asleep, she'll go and waken them,
And hear their voices in the eerie night;
But yet she pauses, loth to break their rest.
God send the husband and the father home!
"No one looks out for me in all this world,
No one have I to look for! Ah poor me!
Well, well!" he murmurs meek. Turning, he locks
His lonely door, and stumps away to bed.
CAMPAIGN THE SECOND.
How fresh the morning meadow of the spring,
Pearl-seeded with the dew: adown its path,
Bored by the worms of night, the Old Soldier takes
His wonted walk, and drinks into his heart
The gush and gurgle of the cold green stream.
The huddled splendour of the April noon;
Glancings of rain; the mountain-tops all quick
With shadowy touches and with greening gleams;
Blue bent the Bow of God; the coloured clouds,
Soaked with the glory of the setting sun,--
These all are his for pleasure: his the Moon,
Chaste huntress, dipping, o'er the dewy hills,
Her silver buskin in the dying day.
The summer morn is up: the tapering trees
Are all a-glitter. In his garden forth
The Old Soldado saunters: hovering on
Before him, oft upon the naked walk
Rests the red butterfly; now full dispread;
Now, in the wanton gladsomeness of life,
Half on their hinges folding up its wings;
Again full spread and still: o'erhead away,
Lo! now it wavers through the liquid blue.
But he intent from out their straw-roofed hives
Watches his little foragers go forth,
Boot on the buds to make, to suck the depths
Of honey-throated blooms, and home return,
Their thighs half smothered with the yellow dust.
Dibble and hoe he plies; anon he props
His heavy-beaded plants, and visits round
His herbs of grace: the simple flowerets here
Open their infant buttons; there the flowers
Of preference blow, the lily and the rose.
Fast by his cottage door there grows an oak,
Of state supreme, drawn from the centuries.
Pride of the old man's heart, in many a walk.
Far off he sees its top of sovereignty,
And with instinctive loyalty his cap
Soldierly touches to the Royal Tree--
King of all trees that flourish! King revered!
Trafalgars lie beneath his rugged vest,
And in his acorns is The Golden Age!
Summer the time; thoughtful beneath his tree
The Veteran puffs his intermittent pipe,
And cheats the sweltering hours; yet noting oft
The flight of bird, and exhalation far
Quivering and drifting o'er the fallow field,
And the great cloud rising upon the noon,
The sultry smithy of the thunder-forge.
Anon the weekly journal of events
Conning, he learns the doings of the world,
And what it suffers--justice-loosened wrath
Falling from Heaven upon unrighteous states,
Famine, and plague, earthquake, and flood, and fire;
Lean Sorrow tracking still the bread-blown Sin;
A spirit of lies; high-handed wrong; the curse
Of ignorance crass and fat stupidity;
Glib demagogue tongues that sow the dragon-teeth
Of wars along the valleys of the earth;
And maddened nations at their contre-dance
Of revolutions, when each bloody hour
Comes staggering in beneath its load of crimes,
Enough to bend the back of centuries.
The sun goes down the western afternoon,
Lacing the clouds with his diverging rays:
Homeward the children from the village school
Come whooping on; but aye their voices fall,
As aye they turn unto the old man's door--
So much they love him. He their progress notes
In learning, and has prizes for their zeal,
Flowers for the girls, and fruit, hooks for the boys,
Whistles, and cherry-stones; and, to maintain
The thews and sinews of our coming men,
He makes them run and leap upon the green.
The nodding wain has borne the harvest home,
And yellowing apples spot the orchard trees:
Now may you oft the Old Soldado see
Stumping relieved against the evening sky
Along the ferny height--so much he loves
Its keen and wholesome air; nor less he loves
To hear the rustling of the fallen leaves,
Swept by the wind along the glittering road,
As home he goes beneath the autumnal moon.
Thus round the starry girdle of the year
His spirit circles thankfully. Not grieved
When winter comes once more, with chosen books
He sits with Wisdom by his evening fire;
Puff goes his cheerful pipe; by turns he works;
And ever from his door, before he sleeps,
He views the stars of night, and thinks of Him
Whose simplest fiat is the birth of worlds.
CAMPAIGN THE THIRD.
Lo! yonder sea-mew seeks the inland moss:
Beautiful bird! how snowy clean it shows
Behind the ploughman, on a glinting day,
Trooping with rooks, and farther still relieved
Against the dark-brown mould, alighting half,
Half hovering still; yet far more beautiful
Its glistening sleekness, when from out the deep
Sudden and shy emerging on your lee,
What time through breeze, and spray, and freshening brine,
Your snoring ship, beneath her cloud of sail,
Bends on her buried side, carried it rides
The green curled billow and the seething froth,
Turning its startled head this way and that,
Half looking at you with its wild blue eye,
Then moves its fluttering wings and dives anew!
Smoking his pipe of peace, wearing away
The summer eve, the old Soldado sits
Beneath his buzzing oak, and eyes the bird,
With many a thought of the suggested sea.
The veering gull came circling back and near:
"What! nearer still?" the Veteran said, and rose,
And doffed his bonnet, and held down his pipe:
"Give me her message, then! O be to me
Her spirit not unconscious from the deep
Of how I mourn her lost! Ah! bird, you're gone.
Vain dreamer I! For every night my soul
Knocks at the gates of the invisible world
But no one answers me, no little hand
Comes out to grasp at mine. Well, all is good:
Even, bird, thy heart-deceiving change of flight,
To teach me patience, was ordained of old."
Yes, all is ordered well. Aimless may seem
The wandering foot; even it commissioned treads
The very lines by Providence laid down,
Sure though unseen, of all-converging good.
Look up, old man, and see:--
Along the road
Came one in sailor's garb: his shallow hat,
Of glazed and polished leather, shone like tin.
A fair young damsel led him by the hand--
For he was blind: and to the summer sun,
Fearless and free, he held his bronzed face.
An armless sleeve, pinned to his manly breast,
Told he had been among the "Hearts of Oak."
The damsel saw the old man of the tree,
His queue of character, and wooden leg,
And smiling whispered to the tar she led.
Near turned, both stood. Down from her shoulder then
The maid unslung a mandolin, and played,
High singing as she played, a battle-piece
Of bursts and pauses: keeping time the while,
Now furious fast, now dying slow away,
His pigtail wagging with emotion deep,
The Old Soldier puffed his sympathetic pipe.
The minstrel ceased; he drew his leathern purse,
With pension lined, and offered guerdon due.
"Nay," said the maiden, smiling, "for your tye
Alone I played, and for your wooden leg;
Yea, but for these, the symbols of the things
You've done and suffered--like my father here."
"Well, then, you'll taste my honey and my bread?"
The Soldier said, and from his cot he brought
Seats for the strangers; him the damsel helped,
Bearing the bread and honey; and they ate,
The damsel serving, and she ate in turn.
When various talk had closed the simple feast,
The strangers rose to go: "My head! my head!"
The sailor cried, and fell in sudden pangs.
They bore and laid him on the Soldier's bed.
Forth ran the lass, and from the neighbouring town
Brought the physician; but his skill was vain,
For God had touched him, and the man must die.
His mind was clear: "Give me that cross, my child,
That I may kiss it ere my spirit part,"
He said. And from her breast the damsel drew
A little cross, peculiar shaped and wrought,
And gave it him. It caught the Soldier's eye
And when the girl received it back, he took
And looked at it.
"This cross, O dying man,
Was round my daughter's neck, when in the deep
She perished from me, on that fatal night
The 'Sphinx' was burnt, forth sailing from the Clyde.
Her dying mother round the infant's neck
This holy symbol, with her blessing, hung.
Friendless at home, I took my only child,
Bound to the Western World, where we had friends.
Scarce out of port, up flamed our ship on fire,
With crowding terrors through the umbered night.
O! what a shout of joy, when through the gloom
That walled us round within our glaring vault,
Spectral and large, we saw the ships of help.
Our boats were lowered; the first, o'ercrowded, swamped;
Down to the second, as it lurched away,
I flung my child: the monstrous waves went by
With backs like blood: the sudden-shifting boat
Is off with one, another has my babe.
I sprung to save her--all the rest is drear,
Grisly confusion, till I found me laid,
On some far island, in a fisher's hut.
Me, as they homeward scudded past the fire,
Those lonely farmers of the deep picked up,
Floating away, and rubbed to vital heat;
And through the fever-gulf that had me next,
With simple love they brought my weary life.
The shores and islands round, for lingering news
Of people saved from off that burning wreck,
O! how I haunted then; but of my child
No man had heard. Hopeless, and naked poor,
To war I rushed. This cot received me next;
And here, I trust, my mortal chapter ends.
But say, O say! how came you by this cross?"
The dying man upon his arm had risen,
Ere ceased the Soldier's tale: "She is thy child,
Take her," he said; "and may she be to thee,
As she to me has been, a daughter true,
A child of good, a blessing from on high!"
So saying, back he fell. Around his neck
Her arms of love the sobbing damsel threw,
And kissed him many a time. And then she rose,
And flung herself upon the Soldier's breast--
For he's her father too. And many tears,
Silent, the old man rained upon her neck.
"O wondrous night!" the dying tar went on,
"Who could have thought of this! I am content.
The Lord be praised that she has found a friend,
Since I must go from her! That night of fire,
Our brig of war bore down upon your ship,
And sent her boats to save you from the flame.
Near you we could not come; so forth I swam,
And to your crowded stern I fixed a rope,
To take the people off. Back as I slid
Along the line, to show them how to come,
A child, upheaved upon the billow top,
Was borne against my breast; I snatched her up;
Fast to my neck she clung; none could I find
To claim and take her: she was thus mine own.
That night she wore the cross which now she wears.
Why need I tell the changes of my life?
In war I lost an arm, and then an eye;
My other eye went out from sympathy,
And home I came a blind and helpless man.
But I had still one comforter, my child--
My young breadwinner, too! From wake to wake
She led me on, playing her mandolin,
Which I had brought her from the south of Spain.
She'll tell you all the rest when I am gone.
Bury me now in your own burial-place,
That still our daughter may be near my dust.
And Jesus keep you both!" he said, and died.
They buried him in their own burial-place.
And many a flower, heart-planted by that maid
And good Old Soldier, bloomed upon his grave.
And many a requiem, when the gloaming came,
The damsel played above his honoured dust.
Not less, but all the more, her heart was knit
Unto her own true father. He, the while,
How proud was he to give her up his keys,
Mistress installed of all his little stores;
And introduce her to his flowers, and bees,
Making the sea-green honey--all for her;
And sit beside her underneath the oak,
Listening the story of her bygone life.
In turn she made him of her mother tell,
And aye a tear dropped on her needlework;
And all his wars the old campaigner told.
And God was with them, and in peace and love
They dwelt together in their happy home.
RESULTS OF REVOLUTION IN EUROPE.
The fall of Napoleon completed the first drama of the historical
series arising out of the French Revolution. Democratic ambition
had found its natural and inevitable issue in warlike achievement;
the passions of the camp had succeeded those of the forum, and
the conquest of all the Continental monarchies had, for a time,
apparently satiated the desires of an insatiable people. But the
reaction was as violent as the action. In every warlike operation
two parties are to be considered--the conquerors and the conquered.
The rapacity, the insolence, the organised exactions of the French
proved grievous in the extreme, and the hardship was felt as the
more insupportable when the administrative powers of Napoleon gave
to them the form of a regular tribute, and conducted the riches of
conquered Europe, in a perennial stream, to the imperial treasury. A
unanimous cry of indignation arose from every part of the Continent;
a crusade commenced, in all quarters, from the experienced suffering
of mankind; from the east and from the west, from the north and from
the south, the liberating warriors came forth, and the strength of
an injured world collected by a convulsive effort at the heart, to
throw off the load which had oppressed it. Securely cradled amidst
the waves, England, like her immortal chief at Waterloo, had calmly
awaited the hour when she might be called on to take the lead in the
terrible strife. Her energy, when it arrived, rivalled her former
patience in privation, her fortitude in suffering; and the one
only, nation which, throughout the struggle, had been unconquered,
at length stood foremost in the fight, and struck the final and
decisive blow for the deliverance of the world.
But the victory of nations did not terminate the war of opinion;
the triumph of armies did not end the collision of thought. France
was conquered, but the principles of her Revolution were not
extirpated; they had covered her own soil with mourning, but they
were too flattering to the pride of the human heart to be subdued
but by many ages of suffering. The lesson taught by the subjugation
of her power, the double capture of her capital, was too serious
to be soon forgotten by her rulers; but the agony which had been
previously felt by the people, had ended with a generation which was
now mouldering in its grave. It is by, the last impressions that
the durable opinions of mankind are formed; and effects had here
succeeded each other so rapidly, that the earlier ones were in a
great measure forgotten. The conscription had caused the guillotine
to be forgotten; grief for the loss of the frontier of the Rhine
had obliterated that of the dissolution of the National Assembly.
Men did not know that the first was the natural result of the
last. There was little danger of France soon crossing the Rhine,
but much of her reviving the opinions of Mirabeau and Siéyès. The
first drama, where the military bore the prominent part, was ended;
but the second, in which civil patriots were to be the leading
characters, and vehement political passions excited, was still to
commence; the Lager had terminated, but the Piccolomini was only
beginning, and Wallenstein's Death had not yet commenced.
Everything conspired to render the era subsequent to the fall of
Napoleon as memorable for civil changes as that era itself had
been for military triumphs. Catherine of Russia had said at the
commencement of the Revolution, that the only way to prevent its
principles spreading, and save Europe from civil convulsion, was
to engage in war, and cause the national to supersede the social
passions. The experiment, after a fearful struggle, succeeded; but
it succeeded only for a time. War wore itself out; a contest of
twenty years' duration at once drained away the blood and exhausted
the treasures of Europe. The excitement, the animation, the mingled
horrors and glories of military strife, were followed by a long
period of repose, during which the social passions were daily
gaining strength from the very magnitude of the contest which had
preceded it. The desire for excitement continued, and the means
of gratifying it had ceased: the cannon of Leipsic and Waterloo
still resounded through the world, but no new combats furnished
daily materials for anxiety, terror, or exultation. The nations
were chained to peace by the immensity of the sacrifices made in
the preceding war: all governments had suffered so much during its
continuance, that, like wounded veterans, they dreaded a renewal
of the fight. During the many years of constrained repose which
succeeded the battle of Waterloo, the vehement excitement occasioned
by the Revolutionary wars continued; but, from default of external,
it turned to internal objects. Democratic came instead of military
ambition; the social succeeded the national passions; the spirit was
the same, but its field was changed. Meanwhile the blessed effect of
long continued peace, by allowing industry in every quarter to reap
its fruits in quiet, was daily adding to the strength and energy,
because augmenting the resources, of the middle class, in whom these
feelings are ever the strongest, because they are the first to be
promoted by a change; while, in a similar proportion, the power of
government was daily declining, from the necessity of providing for
the interest of the debts contracted during the preceding strife,
and reducing the military forces which had so long averted its
dangers or achieved its triumphs.
The change in the ruling passions of mankind has clearly appeared in
the annals of nations, in the thirty years which followed the fall
of Napoleon. Governments have often great difficulties to contend
with, but it has been not with each other, but with their subjects;
many of them have been overturned, not by foreign armies, but by
their own. Europe has been often on the verge of a general war, but
the danger of it arose not, as in former days, from the throne, but
the cottage; the persons who urged it on were not kings or their
ministers, but the tribunes of the people. The chief efforts of
governments in every country have been directed to the preservation
of that peace which the collisions of so many interests, and
the vehemence of such passions, endangered: war was repeatedly
threatened, but it was so, not by sovereigns, but by the people. The
sovereigns were successful; but their being so only augmented the
dangers of their position, and increased the peril arising from the
ardour of the social passions with which they had to contend; for
every year of peace added to the strength of their opponents as much
as it diminished their own.
The preservation of peace, unbroken from 1815 to 1830, was fraught
with immense blessings to Europe; and, had it been properly
improved, might have been so to the cause of freedom throughout the
world; but it proved fatal to the dynasty of the Restoration. From
necessity, as well as inclination, from the recollection of the
double capture of Paris, as well as conscious inability to conduct
warlike operations, Louis XVIII. remained at peace; and no monarch
who does so seems likely to remain long on the French throne. Death,
and extreme prudence of conduct, alone saved him from dethronement.
The whole history of the Restoration, from 1815 to 1830, was that
of one vast and ceaseless conspiracy against the Bourbons, existing
rather in the hearts and minds than the measures and designs of
men. No concessions to freedom, no moderation of government, no
diminution of public burdens, could reconcile the people to a
dynasty imposed on them by the stranger. One part of the people
were dreaming of the past, another speculating on the future; all
were dissatisfied with the present. The wars, the glories of the
Empire, rose up in painful contrast to the peace and monotony of
the present. Successive contractions of the elective constituency,
and restrictions on the press, had no effect in diminishing the
danger it excited in the minds of men, and only became, like
all other concealed passions, more powerful from the difficulty
of giving it expression. France was daily increasing in wealth,
freedom, and material well-being, but it was as steadily declining
in contentment, loyalty, and happiness--a strange combination, but
such as is by no means unknown in private life, when all external
appliances are favourable, but the heart is gnawed by a secret and
ungratified passion. At length the general discontent rose to such a
pitch that it became impossible to carry on the government; a _coup
d'état_ was attempted, to restore some degree of efficiency to the
executive, but it was attempted by the "feeble arms of confessors
and kings;" the army wavered in its duty; the Orleans family took
advantage of the tumult, and the dynasty of the elder branch of the
Bourbons was overthrown.
That so great an event as the overthrow of a dynasty by a sudden
urban insurrection, should have produced a great impression all over
the world, was to have been expected; but it could hardly have been
anticipated it would have been attended by the effects with which
it actually was in Great Britain. But many causes had conspired at
that period to prepare the public mind in England for changes; and,
what is very remarkable, these causes had arisen mainly from the
magnitude of the successes with which the war had been attended. The
capital which had been realised during the war had been so great,
the influence of the moneyed interest had become so powerful, that
the legislature became affected by their desires. The Monetary Bill
of 1819, before many years had elapsed, had added 50 per cent to
the value of money, and the weight of debts and taxes, and taken
as much from the remuneration of industry. Hence a total change in
the feelings, influences, and political relations of society. The
territorial aristocracy was weakened as much as the commercial was
aggrandised; small landed proprietors were everywhere ruined from
the fall of prices; the magnates stood forth in increased lustre
from the enhanced value of their revenues. Industry was querulous
from long-continued suffering; wealth, ambitious from sudden
exaltation. Political power was coveted by one class, from the
excess of their riches; by another, from the depth of their misery.
The emancipation of the Roman Catholics severed the last bond,
that of a common religion, which had hitherto held together the
different classes, and imprinted on the minds of a large and sincere
class a thirst for vengeance, which overwhelmed every consideration
of reason. The result of these concurring causes was that the
institutions of England were essentially altered by the earthquake
of 1830, and a new class elevated to supreme power by means,
bloodless indeed, but scarcely less violent than the revolution
which had overturned Charles X.
The revolution of 1830 elevated the middle class to the direction
of affairs in France, and the Reform Bill vested the same class
in effect with supreme power in the British empire. Vast effects
followed this all-important change in both countries. For the first
time in the history of mankind the experiment was made of vesting
the electoral franchise, not in a varied and limited class, as in
Old England, or in the whole citizens, as in revolutionary France
or America, but in persons possessed only of a certain money
qualification. The franchise was not materially changed in France,
but the general arming of the National Guard, and the revolutionary
origin of the new government, effectually secured attention to the
wishes of the burgher aristocracy; in England they were at once
vested with the command of the state, for the House of Commons was
returned by a million of electors, who voted for 658 members, of
whom two-thirds were the representatives of boroughs, and two-thirds
of their constituents shopkeepers, or persons whom they influenced.
Thence consequences of incalculable importance in both countries,
and effects which have left indelible traces in the future history
of mankind.
The first effect of this identity of feeling and interest, in the
class thus for the first time intrusted with the practical direction
of affairs in both countries, was a close political alliance between
their governments, and an entire change in the Foreign policy of
Great Britain. To the vehement hostility and ceaseless rivalry of
four centuries succeeded an alliance sincere and cordial at the
time; though, like other intimacies founded on identity of passion,
not of interest, it might be doubted whether it would survive the
emotions which gave it birth. In the mean time, however, the
effects of this alliance were novel, and in the highest degree
important. When the lords of the earth and the sea united, no
power in Europe ventured to confront them; the peace of Europe was
preserved by their union. The Czar in full march towards Paris was
arrested on the Vistula; he found ample employment for his arms
in resisting the efforts of the Poles to restore their much-loved
nationality. Austria and Prussia were too much occupied with the
surveillance of the discontented in their own dominions to think of
renewing the crusade of 1813; nor did they venture to do so when the
forces of England were united to those of France. The consequence
was that the march of revolution was unresisted in Western Europe,
and an entire change effected in the institutions and dynasties on
the throne in its principal continental states. The Orleans family
continued firmly, and to all appearance permanently, seated on
the throne of France; Belgium was revolutionised, torn from the
monarchy of the Netherlands, and the Cobourg family seated on its
throne: the monarchies of Spain and Portugal were overturned, and
a revolutionary dynasty of queens placed on the thrones of these
countries, in direct violation of the Treaty of Utrecht; while in
the east of Europe the last remnants of Polish nationality were
extinguished on the banks of the Vistula. Durable interests were
overlooked, ancient alliances broken, long-established rivalries
forgotten in the fleeting passions of the moment. Confederacies
the most opposite to the lasting policy of the very nations who
contracted them, were not only formed, but acted upon. Europe beheld
with astonishment the arms of Prussia united with those of Russia to
destroy the barrier of the Continent against the Muscovite power on
the Sarmatian plains; the Leopards of England joined to the tricolor
standard to wrest Antwerp from Holland, and secure the throne of
the Netherlands to a son-in-law of France; and the scarlet uniforms
blended with the ensigns of revolution to beat down the liberties of
the Basque provinces, and prepare the heiress of Spain for the arms
of a son of France, on the very theatre of Wellington's triumphs.
Novel and extraordinary as were these results of the revolution
of 1830 upon the political relations of Europe, its effects upon
the colonial empire of England, and, through it, upon the future
destinies of the human species, were still greater and more
important. To the end of the world, the consequences of the change
in the policy of England will be felt in every quarter of the globe.
Its first effect was to bring about the emancipation of the negroes
in the West Indies. Eight hundred thousand slaves in the British
colonies in that quarter of the globe received the perilous gift of
unconditional freedom. For the first time in the history of mankind
the experiment was made of extending the institutions of Japhet to
the sons of Ham. As a natural result of so vast and sudden a change,
and of the conferring of the institutions of the Anglo-Saxons upon
unlettered savages, the proprietors of those noble colonies were
ruined, their affections alienated, and the authority of the mother
country preserved only by the terror of arms. Canada shared in the
moral earthquake which shook the globe, and that noble offshoot of
the empire was only preserved to Great Britain by the courage of
its soldiers and the loyalty of its English and Highland citizens.
Australia rapidly advanced in wealth, industry, and population
during these eventful years. Every commercial crisis which paralysed
industry, every social struggle which excited hope, every successful
innovation which diminished security, added to the stream of hardy
and enterprising emigrants who crowded to its shores; New Zealand
was added to the already colossal empire of England in Oceania;
and it is apparent that the foundations have been laid in a fifth
hemisphere of another nation, destined to rival, perhaps eclipse,
Europe itself in the career of human improvement. For the first time
in the history of mankind the course of advancement ceased to be
from East to West; but it was not destined to be arrested by the
Rocky Mountains; the mighty day of four thousand years was drawing
to its close; but before its light was extinguished in the West,
civilisation had returned to the land of its birth; and ere its
orb had set in the waves of the Pacific, the sun of knowledge was
illuminating the isles of the Eastern Sea.
Great and important as have been these results of the social
convulsions of France and England in the first instance, they sink
into insignificance compared to those which have followed the change
in the commercial policy and increased stringency of the monetary
laws of Great Britain. The effect of these all-important measures,
from which so much was expected, and so little, save suffering,
has been received, has been to augment to an extraordinary and
unparalleled degree the _outward_ tendency of the British people.
The agricultural population, especially in Ireland, has been
violently torn up from the land of its birth by woeful suffering;
a famine of the thirteenth appeared amidst the population of the
nineteenth century; and to this terrible but transient source of
suffering has been superadded the lasting discouragement arising
from the virtual closing of the market of England to Irish produce,
by the inundations of grain from foreign states. Since the barriers
raised by human regulations have been thrown down, the eternal laws
of nature have appeared in full operation; the old and rich state
can always undersell the young and poor one in manufactures, and
is always under-sold by it in agricultural produce. The fate of
old Rome apparently is reserved for Great Britain; the harvests
of Poland, the Ukraine, and America, prostrate agriculture in
the British Isles as effectually as those of Sicily, Libya, and
Egypt did the old Patrimony of the Legions; and after the lapse of
eighteen hundred years the same effects appear. The great cities
flourish, but the country decays; the exportation of human beings
and the importation of human food keep up a gainful traffic in
the seaport towns; but it is every day more and more gliding into
the hands of the foreigner; and while exports and imports are
constantly increasing, the mainstay of national strength, the
cultivation of the soil, is rapidly declining. The effects upon the
strength, resources, and population of the empire, and the growth
of its colonial possessions, have been equally important. Europe,
before the middle of the century, beholds with astonishment Great
Britain, which, at the end of the war, had been self-supporting,
importing ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of
the national subsistence, and a constant stream of three hundred
thousand emigrants annually leaving its shores. Its inhabitants,
which for four centuries had been constantly increasing, have
declined a million in the last five years in the two islands, and
two millions in Ireland, taken separately; but the foundations of
a vast empire have been laid in the Transatlantic and Australian
wilds; and the annual addition of three hundred thousand souls to
the European population of the New World by immigration alone, has
come almost to double the already marvellous rapidity of American
increase.
While this vast transference of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic
population to the embryo states of America and Australia has been
going forward, the United States of America are rapidly increasing
in numbers and extent of territory. The usual and fearful ambition
of republican states has appeared there in more than its usual
proportions. During the ten years from 1840 to 1850, the inhabitants
of the United States have increased six millions: they have grown
from eighteen to twenty-four millions. But the increase of its
territory has been still more extraordinary: it has been extended,
during the same period, from somewhat above two millions, to three
million three hundred thousand square miles. A territory nine times
the size of Old France has been added to the devouring Republic in
ten years. The conquests of Rome in ancient, of the English in India
in modern times, afford no parallel instance of rapid and unbroken
increase. Everything indicates that a vast migration of the human
species is going forward, and the family of Japhet in the course
of being transferred from its native to its destined seats. To
this prodigious movement it is hard to say whether the disappointed
energies of democratic vigour in Europe, or the insatiable spirit
of republican ambition in America, has most contributed; for the
first overcame all the attachments of home, and all the endearments
of kindred in a large--and that the most energetic--portion of the
people in the old world; while the latter has prepared for their
reception ample seats--in which a kindred tongue and institutions
prevail--in the new.
While this vast and unexampled exodus of the Anglo-Saxon race,
across a wider ocean than the Red Sea, and to a greater promised
land than that of Canaan, has been going forward, a corresponding,
and in some respects still more marvellous, increase of the
Sclavonic race in the Muscovite dominions has taken place. The
immense dominions and formidable power of the Czar, which had
received so vast an addition from the successful termination of
the contest with Napoleon, were scarcely less increased by the
events of the long peace which followed. The inhuman cruelty with
which the Turks prosecuted the war with the Greeks, awakened all
the sympathies of the Christian world; governments were impelled
by their subjects into a crusade against the Crescent; and the
battle of Navarino, which, for the first time in history, beheld
the flags of England, France, and Russia side by side, at once
ruined the Ottoman navy, and reft the most important provinces of
Greece from Turkey. The inconceivable infatuation of the Turks, and
their characteristic ignorance of the strength of the enemy whom
they provoked, impelled them soon after into a war with Russia; and
then the immeasurable superiority which the Cross had now acquired
over the Crescent at once appeared. Varna, the scene of the bloody
defeat of the French chivalry by the Janizaries of Bajazet, yielded
to the scientific approaches of the Russians; the barrier, hitherto
insurmountable, of the Balkan, was passed by Diebitch; Adrianople
fell; and the anxious intervention of the other European powers
alone prevented the entire subjugation of Turkey, and the entry of
the Muscovite battalions through the breach made by the cannon of
Mahomet in the walls of Constantinople.
Great as were these results to the growth of Russia, of the forced
and long-continued pacification of Western Europe, still more
important were those which followed its intestine convulsions.
Every throe of the revolutionary earthquake in France has tended to
its ultimate advantage, and been attended by a great accession of
territory or augmentation of influence. The Revolution of 1789 in
its ultimate effects brought the Cossacks to Paris; that of 1830
extinguished the last remains of Polish nationality, and established
the Muscovites in a lasting sway on the banks of the Vistula. The
revolt of Ibrahim Pacha, and the victory of Koniah, which reduced
the Ottoman empire to the verge of destruction, brought the Russian
battalions to Scutari, and averted subjugation from a rebellious
vassal, only by surrendering the keys of the Dardanelles to the
Czar, and converting the Black Sea into a Russian lake. Greater
still have been the results of the French Revolution of 1848 to
the moral influence, and through it the real power, of Russia.
Germany, torn by revolutionary passions, was soon brought into the
most deplorable state of anarchy; Austria, distracted at once by a
Bohemian, Italian, and Hungarian revolt, was within a hair-breadth
of destruction; and the presence of 150,000 Russians on the
Hungarian plains alone determined the Magyar contest in favour of
Austria. Immense is the addition which this decisive move has made
to the influence of Russia; no charge of the Old Guard of Napoleon
at the close of the day was ever more triumphant. Russia now boasts
of 66,000,000 of men within her dominions; her territories embrace a
seventh of the habitable globe; and her influence is paramount from
the wall of China to the banks of the Rhine.
Great as the acquisitions of the Muscovite power have been during
the last thirty years, they have almost been rivalled by those of
the British in India. They have fairly outstripped everything in
this age of wonders; a parallel will in vain be sought for them in
the whole annals of the world. They do not resemble the conquests
of the Romans in ancient, or of the Russians in modern times; they
have not been the result of the lust of conquest, steadily and
perseveringly applied to general subjugation, or the passions of
democracy finding their natural vent in foreign conquest. As little
were they the offspring of a vehement and turbulent spirit, similar
to that which carried the French eagles to Vienna and the Kremlin.
The disposition of the Anglo-Saxons, practically gain-seeking,
and shunning wars as an interruption of their profits, has been a
perpetual check to any such disposition--their immense distance
from the scene of action on the plains of Hindostan, an effectual
bar to its indulgence. India has not been governed by a race of
warlike sovereigns, eager for conquest, covetous of glory; but by
a company of pacific merchants, intent only on the augmentation of
their profits and the diminution of their expenses. Their great
cause of complaint against the Governors-General to whom have been
successively intrusted the government of their vast dominions,
was, that they were too prone to defensive preparations; that they
did not sufficiently study the increase of these profits or the
saving of these expenses. War was constantly forced upon them as a
measure of necessity; repeated coalitions of the native sovereigns
compelled them to draw the sword to prevent their expulsion from the
peninsula. Conquest has been the condition of existence.
Yet such is the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the energy with
which the successive contests were maintained by the diminutive
force at the disposal of the company, that marvellous beyond all
example have been the victories which they gained and the conquests
which they achieved. The long period of European peace which
followed the battle of Waterloo, was anything but one of repose in
India. It beheld successively the final war with, and subjugation
of, the Mahrattas by the genius of Lord Hastings, the overthrow of
the Pindaree horsemen, the difficult subjugation of the Goorkha
mountaineers; the storming of Bhurtpore, the taming of "the giant
strength of Ava;" the conquest of Cabul, and fearful horrors of
the Coord Cabul retreat; the subsequent gallant recovery of its
capital; the conquest of Scinde, and reduction of Gwalior; the wars
with the Sikhs, the desperate passages of arms at Ferozeshah and
Chilianwalah, and the final triumphs of Sobraon and Goojerat. Nor
was it in the peninsula of Hindostan alone that the strength of the
British, when at length fairly aroused, was exerted; the vast empire
of China was wrestled with at the very moment when their strength
in the East was engaged in the Affghanistan expedition; and the
world, which was anxiously expecting the fall of the much-envied
British empire in India, beheld with astonishment, in the same Delhi
_Gazette_, the announcement of the second capture of Cabul in the
heart of Asia, and the dictating of a glorious peace to the Chinese
under the walls of Nankin.
While successes so great and bewildering were attending the arms
of civilisation on the remote parts of the earth, a great and most
disastrous convulsion was preparing in its heart. Paris, as in every
age, was the centre of impulsion to the whole civilised world. Louis
Philippe had a very difficult game to play, and he long played it
with success; but no human ability could, with the disposition of
the people, permanently maintain the government of the country. He
aimed at being the Napoleon of Peace; and his great predecessor knew
better than any one, and has said oftener, that he himself would
have failed in the attempt. Louis Philippe owed his elevation to
revolution; and he had the difficult, if not impossible, task to
perform, _without foreign war_, of coercing its passions. Hardly
was he seated on the throne, when he felt the necessity in deeds,
if not in words, of disclaiming his origin. His whole reign was a
continued painful and perilous conflict with the power which had
created him, and at length he sank in this struggle. He had not the
means of maintaining the conflict. A successful usurper, he could
not appeal to traditionary influences; a revolutionary monarch, he
was compelled to coerce the passions of revolution; a military
chief, he was obliged to restrain the passions of the soldiers. They
demanded war, and he was constrained to keep them at peace; they
sighed for plunder, and he could only meet them with economy; they
panted for glory, and his policy retained them in obscurity.
Political influence--in other words, corruption--was the only means
left of carrying on the government, and that state engine was
worked with great industry, and for a time with great success. But
although gratification to the selfish passions must always, in the
long run, be the main foundation of government, men are not entirely
and for ever governed by their influence. "C'est l'imagination,"
said Napoleon, "qui domine le monde." All nations, and most of
all the French, occasionally require aliment to the passions; and
no dynasty will long maintain its sway over them which does not
frequently gratify their ruling dispositions. Napoleon was so
popular because he at once consulted their interests and gratified
their passions; Louis Philippe the reverse, because he attended
only to their interests. Great as was his influence, unbounded his
patronage, immense his revenue, it yet fell short of the wants
of his needy supporters: he experienced erelong the truth of the
well-known saying, that every office given away made one ungrateful
and three discontented. The immediate cause of his fall in February
1848 was the pusillanimity of his family, who declined to head his
troops, and the weakness of his counsellors, who urged submission in
presence of danger; but its remote causes were of much older date
and wider extent. Government, to be lasting, must be founded either
on traditionary influence, the gratification of new interests and
passions, or the force of arms; and that one which has not the first
will do well to rest as soon as possible on the two last.
Disastrous beyond all precedent, or what even could have been
conceived, have been the effects of this new revolution in Paris on
the whole Continent; and a very long period must elapse before they
are obviated. The spectacle of a government, esteemed one of the
strongest in Europe, and a dynasty which promised to be of lasting
duration, overturned almost without resistance by an urban tumult,
roused the revolutionary party everywhere to a perfect pitch of
frenzy. A universal liberation from government, and restraint of any
kind, was expected, and for a time attained, by the people in the
principal Continental states, when a republic was again proclaimed
in France; and the people, strong in their newly-acquired rights
of universal suffrage, were seen electing a National Assembly, to
whom the destinies of the country were to be intrusted. The effect
was instantaneous and universal; the shock of the moral earthquake
was felt in every part of Europe. Italy was immediately in a
blaze; Piedmont joined the revolutionary crusade; and the Austrian
forces, expelled from Milan, were glad to seek an asylum behind the
Mincio. Venice threw off the German yoke, and proclaimed again the
independence of St Mark; the Pope was driven from Rome, the Bourbons
in Naples were saved only by the fidelity of their Swiss guards from
destruction; Sicily was severed from their dominion, and all Italy,
from the extremity of Calabria to the foot of the Alps, was arraying
its forces against constituted authority, and in opposition to the
sway of the Tramontane governments. The ardent and enthusiastic were
everywhere in transports, and prophesied the resurrection of a great
and united Roman republic from the courage of modern patriotism; the
learned and experienced anticipated nothing but ruin to the cause of
freedom from the transports of a people incapable of exercising its
power, and unable to defend its rights.
Still more serious and formidable were the convulsions in Germany;
for these were more inspired with the Teutonic love of freedom, and
wielded the arm which so long had been victorious in the fields
of European fame. So violent were the shocks of the revolutionary
earthquake in the Fatherland, that the entire disruption of society
and ruin of the national independence seemed to be threatened by
its effects. Government was overturned after a violent contest in
Berlin. It fell almost without a struggle, from the pusillanimity
of the Emperor, in Vienna. The Prussians, especially in the great
towns, entered, with the characteristic ardour of their disposition,
into the career of revolution; universal suffrage was everywhere
proclaimed--national guards established. The lesser states on
the Rhine all followed the example of Prussia; and an assembly
of delegates, from every part of the Fatherland, at Frankfort,
seemed to realise for a brief period the dream of German unity
and independence. But while the enthusiasts on the Rhine were
speculating on the independence of their country, the enthusiasts in
Vienna and Hungary were taking the most effectual steps to destroy
it. A frightful civil war ensued in all the Austrian provinces, and
soon acquired such strength as threatened to tear in pieces the
whole of its vast dominions. No sooner was the central authority in
Vienna overturned, than rebellion broke out in all the provinces.
The Sclavonians revolted in Bohemia, the Lombards in Italy, the
Magyars in Hungary; the close vicinity of a powerful Russian force
alone restrained the Poles in Gallicia. Worse, even, because more
widely felt than the passions of democracy, the animosities of RACE
burst forth with fearful violence in eastern Europe. The standard
of Georgey in Hungary--whom the Austrians, distracted by civil
war in all their provinces, were unable to subdue--soon attracted
a large part of the indignant Poles, and nearly the whole of the
warlike Magyars, to the field of battle on the banks of the Danube.
Not a hope seemed to remain for the great and distracted Austrian
empire. Chaos had returned; society seemed resolved into its
original elements; and the chief bulwark of Europe against Moscovite
domination seemed on the point of being broken up into several
separate states, actuated by the most violent hatred at each other,
and alike incapable, singly or together, of making head against the
vast and centralised power of Russia.
The first successful stand against the deluge of revolution was made
in Great Britain; and there it was withstood, not by the bayonets
of the soldiers, but by the batons of the citizens. The 10th April
was the Waterloo of chartist rebellion in England; a memorable proof
that the institutions and traditionary influences of a free people,
suited to their wants, and in harmony with their dispositions, can,
in such felicitous circumstances, oppose a more successful barrier
to social dangers than the most powerful military force at the
command of a despotic chief. Rebellion, as usual when England is in
distress, broke out in Ireland; but it terminated in ridicule, and
revealed at once the ingratitude and impotence of the Celtic race
in the Emerald isle. But a far more serious and bloody conflict
awaited the cause of order in the streets of Paris; and society
there narrowly escaped the restoration of the reign of terror and
the government of Robespierre. As usual in civil convulsions, the
leaders of the first successful revolt soon became insupportable to
their infuriated followers; a second 10th August followed, and that
much more quickly than on the first occasion--a second dethronement
of the Bourbons; but it was met by very different opponents.
Cavaignac and the army were not so easily beat down as Louis,
deserted by all the world but his faithful Swiss Guards. The contest
was long, and bloody, and, for a time, it seemed more than doubtful
to which side victory would incline; but at length the cause of
order prevailed. The authority of the Assembly, however, was not
established till above a hundred barricades had been carried at the
point of the bayonet, several thousands of the insurgents slain, and
eleven thousand sentenced to transportation by the courts-martial of
the victorious soldiers.
Less violent in the outset, but more disastrous far in the end,
were the means by which Austria was brought through the throes of
her revolutionary convulsion. It was the army, and the army alone,
which in the last extremity saved the state; but, unhappily, it
was not the national army alone which achieved the deliverance. So
violent were the passions by which the country was torn, so great
the power of the rival races and nations which contended for its
mastery, that the unaided strength of the monarchy was unequal
to the task of subduing them. In Prague, indeed, the firmness of
Windischgratz extinguished the revolt--in Italy the consummate
talents of Radetsky restored victory to the imperial standards, and
drove the Piedmontese to a disgraceful peace; and in the heart of
the monarchy, Vienna, after a fierce struggle, was regained by the
united arms of the Bohemian and Croatian. But in Hungary the Magyars
were not so easily overcome. Such was the valour of that warlike
race, and such the military talents of their chiefs, that, although
not numbering more than a third of the population of Hungary, and
an eighth of that of the whole monarchy, it was found impracticable
to subdue them without external aid. The Russians, as a matter of
necessity, were called in to prevent the second capture of Vienna;
a hundred and fifty thousand Moscovites ere long appeared on the
Hungarian plains--numbers triumphed over valour--and Austria was
saved by the sacrifice of its independence. Incalculable have been
the consequences of this great and decisive movement on the part of
the Czar. Not less than the capture of Paris, it has fascinated and
subdued the minds of men. It has rendered him the undisputed master
of the east of Europe, and led to a secret alliance, offensive and
defensive, which at the convenient season will open to the Russians
the road to Constantinople.
At length the moment of reaction arrived in France itself, and the
country, whose vehement convulsions had overturned the institutions
of so many other states, was itself doomed to undergo the stern
but just law of retribution. The undisguised designs of the
Socialists against property of every kind, the frequent revolts,
the notorious imbecility and trifling of the National Assembly, had
so discredited republican institutions, that the nation was fully
prepared for a change of any kind from democratic to monarchical
institutions. Louis Napoleon had the advantage of a great name, and
of historical associations, which raised him by a large majority
to the presidency, and of able counsellors who steered him through
its difficulties; but the decisive success of the _coup d'etat_ of
December 2nd was mainly owing to the universal contempt into which
the republican rulers had fallen, and the general terror which the
designs of the Socialists had excited. The nation would, perhaps,
not so willingly have ranged itself under the banners of any merely
military chief who promised to shelter them from the evident dangers
with which society was menaced; and the vigour and fidelity of the
army ensured its success. The restoration of military despotism
in France in 1851, after the brief and fearful reign of "liberty,
equality, and fraternity" in that everchanging country, adds another
to the numerous proofs which history affords, that successful
revolution, by whomsoever effected, and under all imaginable
diversity of nations, race, and circumstances, can end only in the
empire of the sword.
But although the dangers of revolutionary convulsion have been
adjourned, at least, if not entirely removed, by the general triumph
of military power on the Continent, and its entire re-establishment
in France, other dangers, of an equally formidable, and perhaps
still more pressing, kind, have arisen from its very success.
Since the battle of Waterloo all the contests in Europe have
been _internal_ only. There have been many desperate and bloody
struggles, but they have not been those of nation against nation,
but of class with class, or race with race. No foreign wars have
desolated Europe; and the whole efforts of government in every
country have been directed to moderating the warlike propensities of
their subjects, and preventing the fierce animosities of nationality
and race from involving the world in general conflagration. So
decisively was this the characteristic of the period, and so great
was the difficulty in moderating the warlike dispositions of their
subjects, that it seemed that the sentiment of the poet should be
reversed, and it might with truth be said--
"War is a game, which, were _their rulers_ wise,
_The people_ should not play at."
But this has been materially changed by the consequences of the
great European revolution of 1848; and it may now be doubted whether
the greatest dangers which threaten society are not those of
foreign subjugation and the loss of national independence. By the
natural effects of the general convulsions of 1848, the armies of
the Continental states have been prodigiously augmented; and such
are the dangers of their respective positions, from the turbulent
disposition of their own subjects, that they cannot be materially
reduced. In France there are 385,000 men in arms; in Austria as
many; in Prussia, 200,000; in Russia, 600,000. Fifteen hundred
thousand regular soldiers are arrayed on the Continent ready for
mutual slaughter, and awaiting only a signal from their respective
cabinets to direct their united hostility against any country which
may have provoked their resentment. Such have been the results of
the French Revolution of 1848, and the rise of "liberty, equality,
and fraternity" in the centre of European civilisation.
Disastrous beyond all precedent have been the effects of this
revolutionary convulsion, from which so much was expected by the
ardent and enthusiastic in every country, upon the cause of freedom
throughout the world. Not only has the reign of representative
institutions, and the sway of constitutional ideas, been arrested
on the Continent, but the absolute government of the sword has
been established in its principal monarchies. Austria has openly
repudiated all the liberal institutions forced upon her during the
first throes of the convulsion, and avowedly based the government
upon the army, and the army alone. Prussia is more covertly, but not
less assiduously, following out the same system; and in France, the
real council of state, servile senate, and mock assembly of deputies
of Napoleon, have been re-established, the national guard generally
dissolved, and the centralised despotism of Louis Napoleon promises
to rival in efficiency and general support the centralised despotism
of Augustus in ancient days. Parties have become so exasperated
at each other, that no accommodation or compromise is longer
possible; injuries that never can be forgiven have been mutually
inflicted; the despotism of the Prætorians, and a Jacquerie of the
Red Republicans, are the only alternatives left to Europe; and the
fair form of real freedom, which grows and flourishes in peace, but
melts away before the first breath of war, has disappeared from the
earth. Such is the invariable and inevitable result of unchaining
the passions of the people, and of a successful revolt on their part
against the government of knowledge and property.
Still more pressing, and to ourselves formidable, are the dangers
which now threaten this country, from the consequences of that
revolt against established institutions, from which the reign of
universal peace was anticipated four years ago. Our position has
been rendered insecure by the very effects of our former triumphs;
we are threatened with perils, not so much from our enemies, as from
ourselves; it is our weakness which is their strength; and we owe
our present critical position infinitely more to our own blindness
than to their foresight. Insensibility to future and contingent
dangers has in every age been the characteristic of the English
people, and is the real cause why the long wars, in which we have
been engaged for the last century and a half, have been deeply
chequered in the outset with disaster; and to this is to be ascribed
three-fourths of the debt which now oppresses the energies and
cramps the exertions of our people. But several causes, springing
from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, have rendered these
influences in an especial manner powerful during the last thirty
years; and it is the consequence of their united influence which now
renders the condition of this country so precarious.
The contractions of the currency introduced in 1819, and rendered
still more stringent by the acts of 1844 and 1845, have changed
the value of money fifty per cent; coupled with Free Trade in all
the branches of industry, it has doubled it. In other words, it
has doubled the weight of taxes, debts, and encumbrances of every
description, and at the same time halved the resources of those
who are to pay them. Fifty millions a-year raised for the public
revenue, are as great a burden now as a hundred millions a-year
were during the war; the nation, at the close of thirty-five years
of unbroken peace, is in reality more heavily taxed than it was at
the end of twenty years of uninterrupted hostility. The necessary
consequence of this has been, that it has become impossible to
maintain the national armaments on a scale at all proportionate to
the national extension and necessities; and it has been exposed, on
the first rupture, to the most serious dangers from the attacks of
artless and contemptible enemies. Our Indian empire, numbering a
hundred millions of men among its subjects, was brought to the verge
of ruin by the assault of the Sikhs, who had only six millions to
feed their armies; and the military strength of Great Britain is now
strained to the uttermost to withstand the hostility at the Cape
of Good Hope of the Caffres, who never have brought six thousand
men together into the field. In proportion to the extension of our
colonial empire and the necessity of increased forces to defend it,
our armaments have been reduced both by sea and land. Every gleam
of colonial peace has been invariably followed by profuse demands
at home for a reduction of the establishments and a diminution of
the national expenses; until they have been reduced to so low a
point that the nation, which, during the war, had a million of men
in arms, two hundred and forty ships of the line bearing the royal
flag, and a hundred in commission, could not now muster thirty
thousand men and ten ships of the line to guard Great Britain
from invasion, London from capture, and the British Empire from
destruction.
Still more serious, because more irremediable, in its origin, and
disastrous in its effects, has been the change which has come over
the public mind in a powerful and influential part of the nation.
This has mainly arisen from the very magnitude of our former
triumphs, and the long-continued peace to which it has given rise.
The nation had gained such extraordinary successes during the war,
and vanquished so formidable an opponent, that it had come to regard
itself, not without a show of reason, as invincible; hostilities
have been so long intermitted that the younger and more active, and
therefore influential, part of the people, have generally embraced
the idea that they would never be renewed. Here, as elsewhere, the
wish became the father to the thought; the immediate interests of
men determined their opinions and regulated their conduct. The
pacific interests of the Empire had increased so immensely during
the long peace; so many fortunes and establishments had become
dependant on its continuance; exports, imports, and manufactures,
had been so enormously augmented by the growth of our Colonial
Empire, and the preservation of peace with the rest of the world,
that all persons interested in those branches of industry turned
with a shudder from the very thoughts of its interruption. To this
class the Reform Bill, by giving a majority in the House of Commons,
yielded the government of the State. To the astonishment of every
thinking or well-informed man in the world, the doctrine was openly
promulgated, to admiring and assenting audiences in Manchester and
Glasgow, by the most popular orators of the day, that the era of
war had passed away; that it was to be classed hereafter with the
age of the mammoth and the mastodon; and that, in contemplation of
the speedy arrival of the much-desired Millennium, our wisdom would
be to disband our troops, sell our ships of the line, and trust to
pacific interest in future to adjust or avert the differences of
nations. The members for the boroughs--three-fifths of the House of
Commons--openly embraced or in secret inclined to these doctrines;
and how clearly soever the superior information of our rulers might
detect their fallacy, the influence of their adherents was paramount
in the Legislature, and Government was compelled, as the price of
existence, in part at least, to yield to their suggestions.
The danger of acting upon such Utopian ideas has been much
augmented, in the case of this country, by the commercial policy
at the same time pursued by the dominant class who had come to
entertain them. If it be true, as the wisest of men have affirmed
in every age, and as universal experience has proved, that the
true source of riches, as well as independence, is to be found in
the cultivation of the soil, and that a nation which has come to
depend for a considerable part of its subsistence on foreign states
has made the first step to subjugation, the real patriot will
find ample subject of regret and alarm in the present condition
of Great Britain. Not only are ten millions of quarters of grain,
being a full fifth of the national consumption, now imported
from abroad, but nearly the half of this immense importation is
of wheat, the staple food of the people, of which a third comes
from foreign parts. Not only is the price of this great quantity
of grain--certainly not less than twelve millions sterling--lost
to the nation, but so large a portion of its food has come to be
derived from foreign nations, that the mere threat of closing their
harbours may render it a matter of necessity for Great Britain to
submit to any terms which they may choose to exact. Our Colonies,
once so loyal and great a support to the mother country, have been
so thoroughly alienated by the commercial policy of the last few
years, which has deprived them of all the advantages they enjoyed
from their connection with it, that they have become a burden
rather than a benefit. One-half of our diminutive army is absorbed
in garrisoning their forts to guard against revolt. Lastly, the
navy, once our pride and glory, and the only certain safeguard
either against the dangers of foreign invasion, or the blockade of
our harbours and ruin of our commerce, is fast melting away; for
the reciprocity system established in 1823, and the repeal of the
navigation laws in 1849, have given such encouragement to foreign
shipping in preference to our own, that in a few years, if the same
system continue, more than half of our whole commerce will have
passed into the hands of foreign states, which may any day become
hostile ones.
To complete the perils of Great Britain, arising out of the very
magnitude of its former triumphs and extent of its empire, while
so many causes were conspiring to weaken its internal strength,
and disqualify it for withstanding the assault of a formidable
enemy, others, perhaps more pressing, were alienating foreign
nations, breaking up old alliances, and tending more and more to
isolate England in the midst of European hostility. The triumph
of the democratic principle, by the Revolution of 1830 in France,
was the cause of this; for it at once induced an entire change
of government and foreign policy in England, and substituted new
revolutionary for the old conservative alliances. Great Britain
no longer appeared as the champion of order, but as the friend of
rebellion; revolutionary dynasties were, by her influence, joined
with that of France, established in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal;
and the policy of our Cabinet avowedly was to establish an alliance
of constitutional sovereigns in Western, which might counter
balance the coalition of despots in Eastern, Europe. This system
has been constantly pursued, and for long with ability and success
by our Government. Strong in the support of France, whether under
a "throne, surrounded by republican institutions," or under those
institutions themselves, England became indifferent to the jealousy
of the other continental powers; and in the attempt to extend the
spread of liberal institutions, or the sympathy openly expressed
for foreign rebels, irritated beyond forgiveness the cabinets of St
Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin. While the French alliance continued,
these powers were constrained to devour their indignation in
silence; they did not venture, with the embers of revolt slumbering
in their own dominions, to brave the combined hostility of France
and England. But all alliances formed on identity of feeling, not
interest, are ephemeral in their duration. A single day destroyed
the whole fabric on which we rested for our security. Revolutionary
violence everywhere worked out its natural and unavoidable result in
the principal continental states. A military despotism was, after
a sanguinary struggle, established in Austria and Prussia; the 2d
December arrived in France, and that power in an instant was turned
over to the side of the absolute governments on the Continent. Our
efforts to revolutionise Europe have ended in the establishment
of military despotisms in all its principal states, supported by
fifteen hundred thousand armed men--our boasted alliance with
France, in the placing of it in the very front rank of what may
eventually become the league of our enemies.
Lord Palmerston, by whom our foreign policy for the last twenty
years has been mainly conducted, is a man of great talent, both
for eloquence and business, and of extraordinary energy and powers
of application. The charm and grace of his manners are such that
they disarm the most hostile of his opponents in the intercourse
of private society; and such was the vigour of his application,
that he conducted nearly the whole business of the Foreign Office
himself, and reduced the labour of his secretaries and clerks to
the mere copying of despatches and answering routine letters. He
was perfectly master of all the details of his department, and is
probably better acquainted than any man alive with the intricacies
of a diplomacy, which, from the commanding position of England,
has come to embrace the whole civilised world. No man, when called
to account in Parliament for any of his acts which had brought the
country to the very verge of hostility, could defend himself with
more intrepidity, or carry away the House by a more eloquent and
intrepid assertion of the principles, or appeal to the feelings,
which find a responsive echo in the most moving, because the noblest
and most disinterested, chords of the British heart.
Yet, with all this, he was one of the most dangerous Ministers that
ever held the portfolio of the Foreign Office in Great Britain; and
at the period he was displaced, his removal had become, in a manner,
a matter of necessity, if we would avoid an immediate rupture with
the principal Continental powers. The reason was, that his ideas
were entirely at variance with the policy of the ruling party in the
country; and his ambition for his country not less inconsistent with
the situation into which, by the general policy of the Cabinet, it
had been brought, and the views which he himself entertained on the
social institutions of the world. He had been bred in the school
of Mr Pitt and Lord Castlereagh, and his ideas of the position and
influence of England were founded on the state of the country when
it had a million of men in arms and a thousand vessels of war in the
royal navy. He forgot that this was not the condition of the country
after thirty years of unbroken peace; that the spirit which called
forth such vast armaments had expired with the necessities which
created it; that 1851 was not 1815, nor the school of Mr Cobden
that of Mr Pitt. The consequence was, that by his dignified and
patriotic, but withal imprudent and ill-timed assertion of national
demands, he brought us repeatedly to the very verge of hostility
with the most formidable powers on the Continent, at the very time
when, from the total want of any preparation for hostilities in the
country, and the pitiable state of weakness to which our defensive
establishments had been reduced, nothing but disaster was to be
anticipated from their commencement.
These dangers were rendered still more pressing by the extreme
divergence between his political principles and those of the
cabinets of the ruling powers, formerly the allies of England, who
directed the destinies of the Continent. He supported openly, so
far as he could--favoured covertly when this was impossible--the
cause of revolution all over the world. He aided, by the fleets
of England, the establishment of one revolutionary throne in
Belgium--by the marines and volunteers, of another in Spain. He
concluded the quadruple alliance to force revolutionary queens upon
a reluctant people in both kingdoms of the Peninsula. He covertly
aided in the spread of liberal ideas in Italy--openly in supporting
the insurgents in Sicily. He took Russia by the beard in the
Dardanelles, on account of the Hungarian insurgents; and afterwards,
for a wretched private dispute at Athens, ranged France by her
side;--all but brought on a war with France by the bombardment of
Beyrout and hostilities against Greece; and irritated Austria
past forgiveness by the open sympathy expressed for the Hungarian
insurgents. Such conduct might be manly and consistent: a nation
which goes about over the world supporting the cause of revolutions
everywhere, and presenting to every state the alternative of war or
liberal institutions, may be consistent; but its rulers are next
to insane if they are not prepared for the consequences of such
aggressions, and provoke the combined hostility of the greatest
powers, at a time when their country is barely able to sustain the
attack of the smallest.
The great reliance of England throughout this long course of
revolutionary encouragement and aggression, was on the alliance with
France, and the fond belief entertained by our liberal rulers that
the _attente cordiale_ would be perpetual, and form a _national_
compact which would effectually screen us, whatever we did, from the
hostility of the despotic powers on the Continent. The Revolution of
December 2, 1851, in Paris, and the subsequent approval of military
despotism by seven millions and a half of French citizens, may teach
us what foundation there is for such a hope, or what reliance, in
this free country, there is to be placed on identity of feeling with
a military power, which begins its career with the deportation of
some thousand citizens to Cayenne without trial, the decimation of
the Assembly, dissolution of the National Guard, and promulgation,
with general consent, of the despotic institutions of Napoleon. The
dangers arising from those changes to the alliance with England,
are so obvious that they have attracted _universal_ attention; and
Government, however pacifically inclined, and however much under
the control of the Manchester clique, are most properly taking
measures to provide against the danger. Sheerness and Tilbury forts
have been armed, and their magazines filled; two new batteries, of
a hundred guns each, traced out at Plymouth; fortified camps, it is
said, are to be formed round London, and a considerable addition
made to our land and sea forces. We regret as much as any one can
do, the necessity which exists for these changes; but the career of
Liberalism, and of patronising revolutions all over the world, which
we have pursued for the last twenty years, could not by possibility
terminate in any other result.
What makes us augur more favourably than we have done for long, on
the state of the country, notwithstanding these accumulating foreign
dangers, is, that the national mind at home seems to be at length
awakening to a sense of the perils which threaten the Empire. We
have the greatest pleasure in quoting the following article from the
_Times_ on this all-important subject, which is the more valuable as
that able journal has so long derided the idea of any danger being
to be apprehended from foreign hostility:--
"At the accession of Harold to the crown, the English had
enjoyed a peace of nearly fifty years, purchased by the final
expulsion and destruction of their Danish invaders; they were
becoming more and more enamoured of the arts of peace, and had
made considerable progress in such civilisation as the times
allowed. Agriculture was cultivated with great assiduity and
success, and the national mind began to appreciate the benefits
to be derived from foreign trade and commerce. The military
spirit which had animated the descendants of Hengist and Horsa
was gradually dying out, and the nation, united under one
head, looked back with disgust and contempt on the obscure
and bloody civil wars of the Heptarchy. The fortifications of
the towns were allowed to fall into decay, and the equipment
and discipline of the troops were almost entirely neglected.
Dwelling in peace and security under their free elective
institutions, the English looked with gradually increasing
disfavour on the profession of arms. While the mailed chivalry
of Normandy were carrying their banners even to the islands and
peninsulas of the Mediteranean, the Saxon was content to fight
on foot and to protect himself from the blows of a steel-clad
man-at-arms by the imperfect defence of a surcoat of hide.
His offensive arms were as imperfect as his defensive; he
relied almost exclusively on the ponderous battleaxe, which,
requiring both hands to wield it, necessarily left the person
of the soldier exposed to the lance or the arrow. Yet, with
all this, the nation was possessed by a spirit of the most
overweening confidence and self-satisfied security. Proud of
the exploits of their ancestors, believing in the perpetuity of
the long peace they had enjoyed, satisfied with their republican
institutions, and mistaking internal freedom for external
strength, they looked with inert tranquillity on the gradual
increase and organization of the power which was to overwhelm
them; and when at last the blow fell, the nation, at once
confident in its valour and impatient of military fatigue and
privations, flung away its hopes in a single unequal conflict
rather than endure the slow and desolating tactics which must
have worn out the strength of the invader. The English met their
enemies with one-third of their number, believing as devoutly
as the pothouse heroes of our own times that one Englishman to
three Frenchmen was a perfectly equal match, and that the total
absence of cavalry and artillery on their side would be easily
compensated by superior personal bravery. The nation was, at any
rate, content to abide the trial, thinking that even if this
army miscarried, it would be easy to overwhelm the invaders by a
general rising. The army fell, and the nation with it.
"It may seem almost superfluous to apply this analogy to the
state of modern England. We also have been in the enjoyment of
a long and profound peace, and have learnt to consider a war
as Something almost impossible. We also have entirely outlived
the military spirit of the earlier years of this century, and
in the pursuit of wealth and in the development of civilization
have half learnt to believe in the preachers of a millennium, of
the peaceful sweets of which we have already had a foretaste.
We also take no care for the fortification of our country or
the equipment of our troops. We arm them with weapons which
are all but harmless; we load them with accoutrements which
are worse than useless; and we sedulously and successfully
endeavour to render them incapable of bearing fatigue and
hardship. Our navy is employed in training sailors, and, as
soon as we have succeeded in rendering them expert seamen and
gunners, we dismiss them to enter into the service of foreign
nations. Our infantry can hardly march, our cavalry can hardly
ride. These troops, so armed, so disciplined, and so accoutred,
are extremely scanty in numbers; and those numbers we have
materially diminished by sending ten thousand of our best to
make war upon savages five hundred miles on the other side of
the tropic of Capricorn. Yet, under all these circumstances,
we entertain an unbounded confidence in our own resources
and position--we mistake the internal balance and equipoise
of our polity for the power of resisting external force. We
view without apprehension an enormous military power beside
us, assuming a position which renders foreign war almost a
necessity of its existence. We talk of our old victories by
land and by sea, and forget that they were gained by men
whose arms and training placed them on an equality with their
antagonists. We rely on our insular position, which protected
us so efficiently against Napoleon the Great, and insist upon
the impregnable trench that surrounds us, although science
has effectually bridged it over for Napoleon the Little. We
forget the existence of the new power of steam, and the means
of organising combined and unlooked-for movements afforded
by the electric telegraph. We believe that if the storm with
which France is now pregnant does burst, it will be upon the
great military powers of the Continent, who sympathise with the
proceedings of her government, who possess enormous military
resources, and who offer but a poor prize to the victor, instead
of upon us, whose free institutions are a daily reproach to
the slavery and tyranny which disgrace France, whose military
resources are such as we have described, and whose rich shores
have not seen the footprint of a foreign army since the days of
King John. Stranger still, we believe that we are secure against
any sudden blow, and base this agreeable conviction on the good
faith of a man who is what he now is solely because he has been
able to dissemble and to deceive, to swear and to forswear.
Strangest of all, we believe that if a French army should effect
a landing, there is some unknown force in the population of
this country which would overwhelm and absorb them; and that,
while every other people in Europe has proved utterly unable to
contend against military discipline, ours, the least warlike of
any, will easily succeed where they have failed. The historic
parallel seems tolerably close as regards the antecedents;
let us hope, for the sake of this island and the cause of
civilisation and liberty all over the world, that similar causes
may not, in our time, result in a similar catastrophe.
"If disasters are destined for this country in its military
and naval operations, they will, at least, not arrive without
warning. The visitations of the last year have been absolutely
ominous. As if to show us the futility of the resources on which
we are relying, our ships have broken down, our stores have been
condemned, our firearms have proved useless, and our soldiers
are found incapacitated by their equipments from encountering
half their number of naked savages. It would be hard to overlook
such tokens of evil. If, with all our vaunted wealth and skill,
we cannot send reinforcements to the Cape without miscarriages,
or victual our vessels without peril of pestilence, what is to
become of us in the face of such hostilities as men now living
can well remember, and may see again?"--_Times_, Jan. 8 and 10,
1852.
It is a curious coincidence that the views here so ably and
energetically put forth by the great organ of the moneyed and
commercial interests, are precisely those which we have been
constantly enforcing in this miscellany for many years past,
and in an especial manner unfolded on _this day year_, February
1, 1851.[61] No one need be told with what ridicule these views
were received by the whole Manchester school of politicians, and
especially by the able journal which has now so powerfully advocated
them.
[61] See the "Dangers of the Country," _Blackwood's Magazine_,
February 1, 1851.
If views of this kind are entertained by the influential bodies who
now rule the State, and they are acted upon by an able and energetic
Government, there is no cause for despondence as to the external
dangers which, from the necessary consequences of our own acts, now
menace the British Empire. If the powers which may join to assail
us are now much stronger and more united than they were in the time
of Napoleon, our resources have augmented in a similar proportion.
We have the means of defence and security in our own hands, if we
will only make use of them. But it is not by a suicidal policy, and
sacrificing everything to the foreigner, while he is contemplating
the sacrificing us to himself, that this vital object is to be
attained. Our whole dangers, external and internal, are of our own
creation. But for the infatuation of our rulers and people, not one
of them would have had any existence. But for the sacrifice of the
national industry to the moneyed and manufacturing interests by our
Monetary and Free Trade system, we might, five years ago, by merely
keeping up the Sinking Fund as it stood at the battle of Waterloo,
have paid off every shilling of our National Debt, and now reduced
our taxation from fifty to twenty-five millions, and yet maintained
an army of two hundred thousand men, and a fleet of fifty ships of
the line and a hundred steamers, which would have enabled us to bid
defiance to the hostility, by land and sea, of combined Europe.
Instead of our Colonial Empire being on the verge of dissolution,
from universal irritation at our Home Government, and the principal
states of Europe in a state of suppressed hostility, from injuries
that can never be forgiven, we might have had a flourishing and
contented Colonial Empire, and steady friends in our old allies
among the Continental states. Possibly it is too late to remedy the
evils arising from the infatuated policy we have so long pursued
at home and abroad; but this much is certain, that if anything can
avert our dangers, it is the wisdom which can discern--the courage
which can face them--and the magnanimity which can amend the errors
from which they have arisen.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed.
The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the
transcriber and is placed in the public domain.