=Source.=--_The Brighton Herald_, November 19, 1859.
The Volunteer movement goes on with increased vigour in all directions.
In our own county, Chichester, the centre of a large agricultural
district, which ought to furnish a large number of first-rate shots,
has at length moved. The Mayor has called a meeting for Tuesday next.
The Brighton Rifle and Artillery Corps commence drill next week. The
Cinque Ports, Hastings, Rye, and Dover, have been in the field some
time as clubs, and are now about to be enrolled as corps under their
Warden.
Our neighbouring and equally exposed county, Kent, has at length grown
ashamed of its apathy, and various corps--among them the Weald of
Kent Corps--are in course of formation. But the North of Britain is
at present ahead of the South. Glasgow numbers its 2,000 volunteers,
and the West of Scotland alone boasts that it could turn out 30,000 to
meet an invader. We hear upon good authority that 20,000 volunteers
are actually under drill within 20 miles of London, but for the heart
of the Empire this number should be quintupled. But Manchester is now
“up.” Captain Denman, an old Parliamentary candidate, has desired that
£400 subscribed for a memorial to him may be applied to the purposes
of a Rifle Corps; other contributions on the same scale have been
made, and Manchester is soon likely to possess its little army of home
defenders. The present state of feeling in France towards England tends
not a little to promote this defensive movement.
That the French Army was ripe two years ago for a dash at England we
know through the Colonels’ addresses; and the French Army is not a bad
index of the feelings of the population with which it mixes so freely,
and of which it forms so large a proportion. But we know--and it has
been known for some time by all who have relations with France--that
this feeling--the belief in the inevitability of an invasion of England
by France, and a perfect confidence in the result--is not confined to
the army. It pervades the mass of Frenchmen; it has taken possession
of the host of officials who overrun France, and who are the great
engine of Government influence; it extends even to Frenchmen living in
England, and who, whilst inimical to Louis Napoleon’s Government, are
not indisposed to accept him as a champion of French grievances against
England. Of the unfounded nature of these it is useless to argue to
Frenchmen. They may go back to the days of Joan of Arc, or they may
date from Waterloo, but at whatever point they commence there is no
doubt that they rankle in the breasts of Frenchmen much more than we
have been in the habit of supposing; that it is easy to irritate these
old wounds, and that process has been going on for some time, side by
side with an assumption of friendship on the part of the Government.
It may not be intended to put the match to this magazine of national
passion, but we, who would be the victims of the explosion, cannot
ignore its existence. We cannot shut our eyes and ears to the daily
accumulating evidence of a growing belief in the minds of all Frenchmen
that the day must come when all old scores of France against England
will be wiped off; that they now possess the ability to execute this
work of retribution, as they regard it, and that the man who, above
all others, is most interested in accomplishing it, and so working
out his destiny, is at the head of the Government with unbounded
power--with enormous resources--and, above all, that this man takes
no pains to check the growing feeling of hostility in the breasts of
his subjects, but contents himself to-day with taking credit with us
for not gratifying it, as, to-morrow, he may take credit with his own
subjects for giving way to it. In such a state of things it is not
to be wondered at that men hitherto the most pacific in this country
are thinking how they can best defend their homes, wives, children,
and property, and that, at no small inconvenience, thousands are
volunteering their service as a home militia. We are glad to see the
movement so well afoot, and hope it may spread until the English soil
is so covered with armed men that a Frenchman would as little dare to
come here on a warlike errand as he would to thrust his ungloved hand
into a hornets’ nest.