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.