Robert Southey

INTRODUCTORY VIEW OF THE STATE OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL, FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

?Gradual degradation of Spain and Portugal.?

The history of Spain and Portugal, from the foundation of their respective monarchies to the middle of the sixteenth century, when both countries attained their highest point of greatness, is eminently heroic, for the persevering spirit with which they warred against the Moors, never ceasing and scarcely breathing from the contest till they had finally exterminated them; and for the splendour, the extent, and the importance of their foreign conquests. Both kingdoms had risen by the same virtues; the same vices brought on the decline of both; and the history of their decline is not less instructive than that of their rise. Their external relations have been widely different; but notwithstanding this difference, and notwithstanding a national enmity, kept alive rather by old remembrances and mutual pride than by the frequency of their wars with each other, the Spaniards and Portugueze have continued to be morally and intellectually one people. They spring from the same stock; the same intermixture of races has taken place among them; and their national character has been formed by similar circumstances of climate, language, manners, and institutions. The old governments are called free, like all those which the Teutonic tribes established; but this freedom was little better than a scheme of graduated tyranny, and the laws upon which it was founded were only so many privileges which the conquerors reserved or arrogated to themselves. When the commixture of languages and nations was complete, and commerce had raised up a class of men who had no existence under the feudal system, a struggle for political liberty ensued throughout all the European kingdoms. It was soon terminated in Spain: a good cause was ruined by the rashness and misconduct of its adherents; and the scale, after it had been borne down by the sword of the sovereign, never recovered its equipoise: for the Romish church leagued itself with the monarchical authority, against whose abuse it had formerly been the only bulwark; but changing its policy now according to the times, it consecrated the despotism whereby it was upheld in its own usurpations. The effects of this double tyranny were not immediately perceived; but in its inevitable consequences it corrupted and degraded every thing to which it could extend, ... laws, morals, industry, literature, science, arts, and arms.

?Tyranny of the church.?

In other countries where absolute monarchy has been established, and the Romish superstition has triumphed, both have been in some degree modified by the remains of old institutions, the vicinity of free states, and the influence of literature and manners. But in Spain and Portugal almost all traces of the ancient constitution had been effaced; and as there existed nothing to qualify the spirit of popery, a memorable example was given of its unmitigated effects. The experiment of intolerance was tried with as little compunction as in Japan, and upon a larger scale. Like the Japanese government, the Inquisition went through with what it began; and though it could not in like manner secure its victory, by closing the ports and barring the passes of the Peninsula, it cut off, as much as possible, all intellectual communication with the rest of the world.

?Despotism of the two governments.?

The courts of Madrid and Lisbon were as despotic as those of Constantinople and Ispahan. They did not, indeed, manifest their power by acts of blood, because the reigning families were not cruel, and cruelty had ceased to be a characteristic of the times: but with that cold, callous insensibility to which men are liable, in proportion as they are removed from the common sympathies of humankind, they permitted their ministers to dispense at pleasure exile and hopeless imprisonment, to the rigour and inhumanity of which death itself would have been mercy. ?Mal-administration of the laws.? The laws afforded no protection, for the will of the minister was above the laws; and every man who possessed influence at court violated them with impunity, and procured impunity for all whom he chose to protect. Scarcely did there exist even an appearance of criminal justice. Quarrels among the populace were commonly decided by the knife: he who stabbed an antagonist or an enemy in the street wiped the instrument in his cloak, and passed on unmolested by the spectators, who never interfered farther than to call a priest to the dying man. When it happened that a criminal was thrown into prison, there he remained till it became necessary to make room for a new set of tenants: the former were then turned adrift; or, if their crimes had been notorious and frequent, they were shipped off to some foreign settlement.

?Disuse of the Cortes.?

After the triumph of the monarchical power, the Cortes had fallen first into insignificance, then into disuse1. There was no legislative body; the principle of the government being, that all laws and public measures of every kind were to proceed from the will and pleasure of the sovereign. ?Condition of the nobles.? Men of rank, therefore, if they were not in office, had no share in public business; and their deplorable education rendered them little fit either to improve or enjoy a life of perfect leisure. It is said also to have been the system of both governments, while they yet retained some remains of perverted policy, to keep the nobles in attendance about the court, where they might be led into habits of emulous extravagance, which would render them hungry for emoluments, and thereby dependent upon the crown. The long-continued moral deterioration of the privileged classes had produced in many instances a visible physical degeneracy; and this tendency was increased by those incestuous marriages, common in both countries, which pride and avarice had introduced, and for which the sanction of an immoral church was to be purchased.

?Condition of the army.?

The armies partook of the general degradation. The forms of military power existed like the forms of justice: but they resembled the trunk of a tree, of which the termites have eaten out the timber, and only the bark remains. There appeared in the yearly almanacks a respectable list of regiments, and a redundant establishment of officers: but, brave and capable of endurance as the Portugueze and Spaniards are, never were there such officers or such armies in any country which has ranked among civilized nations. Subalterns might be seen waiting behind a chair in their uniforms, or asking alms in the streets; and the men were what soldiers necessarily become, when, without acquiring any one virtue of their profession, its sense of character and of honour, its regularity, or its habits of restraint, they possess all its license, and have free scope for the vices which spring up in idleness. Drawn by lot into a compulsory service, ill-disciplined, and ill-paid, they were burthensome to the people, without affording any security to the nation.

?State of religion.?

The state of religion was something more hopeful, though it is scarcely possible to imagine any thing more gross than the idolatry, more impudent than the fables, more monstrous than the mythology of the Romish church, as it flourished in Spain and Portugal. Wherever this corrupt church is dominant, there is no medium between blind credulity and blank, hopeless, utter unbelief: and this miserable effect tends to the stability of the system which has produced it, because men who have no religion accommodate themselves to whatever it may be their interest to profess. The peasantry and the great mass of the people believed with implicit and intense faith whatever they were taught. The parochial clergy, differing little from the people in their manner of life, and having received an education so nearly worthless that it can scarcely be said to have raised them above the common level, were for the most part as superstitious and as ill-informed as their flock. ?Improvement of the higher clergy.? The higher clergy, however, had undergone a gradual and important change, which had not been brought about by laws or literature, but by the silent and unperceived influence of the spirit of the times. While their principle of intolerance remained the same (being inherent in popery, and inseparable from it), the practice had been greatly abated; and the autos-da-fe, the high festival days of this merciless idolatry, were at an end: for it was felt and secretly acknowledged, that these inhuman exhibitions were disgraceful in the eyes of Europe, and had brought a stain upon the character of the peninsular nations in other catholic countries, and even in Rome itself. The persecution of the Jews therefore (which the founder of the Braganzan line would never have permitted if he had been able to prevent it) ceased; and the distinction between Old and New Christians had nearly disappeared. At the same time, an increased intercourse with heretical states, the power and prosperity of Great Britain, and the estimation in which the British character is held wherever it is known, had insensibly diminished, if not the abhorrence in which heresy was held, certainly the hatred against heretics. Thus the habitual feelings of the clergy had been modified, and they were no longer made cruel by scenes of execrable barbarity, which in former times compelled them to harden their hearts. They became also ashamed of those impostures upon which so large a portion of their influence had been founded: though they did not purge their kalendar, they made no additions to it; miraculous images were no longer discovered: when a grave-digger, in the exercise of his office, happened to find a corpse in a state of preservation, no attempt was made to profit by the popular opinion of its sanctity: miracles became less frequent as they were more scrupulously examined; and impostures2, which, half a century ago, would have been encouraged and adopted, were detected, exposed, and punished. The higher clergy in both countries were decorous in their lives, and in some instances exemplary in the highest degree.

?State of the religious orders.?

To the monastic orders the influence of the times had been less beneficial. There were ages during which those institutions produced the greatest blessings in Europe; when they kept alive the lamp of knowledge, mitigated barbarian manners, and carried the light of Christianity among a race of ferocious conquerors. These uses had long since gone by; and the dissolution of the Jesuits had extinguished the missionary spirit which that extraordinary society had provoked in its rivals, and by which it had itself almost atoned to humanity and to religion for its own manifold misdeeds. The wealthy orders still afforded a respectable provision for the younger sons of old or opulent families; the far more numerous establishments of the mendicants were more injuriously filled from the lower classes. The peasant who was ambitious of seeing a son elevated above the rank in which he was born, destined him for a friar; and he who was too idle to work, or who wished to escape from military service, took shelter in the habit. The mendicant orders were indeed a reproach to Catholicism, and a pest to the countries wherein they existed; they contributed not only to keep the people ignorant, but to render them profligate. Yet even among the Franciscans men were found, who, by their irreproachable conduct, their sincere though misdirected piety, and sometimes by their learning and industrious lives, preserved the order from the contempt into which it would otherwise have fallen even among the vulgar. The nunneries of every description produced nothing but evil, except in those cases where persons went into them by their own choice, who in Protestant countries would have been consigned to a Bedlam.

?Improving literature.?

Literature had revived in both kingdoms, and was flourishing, notwithstanding the restraints which the government and the Inquisition continued to impose. Few similar institutions have equalled the Royal Academies of Madrid and Lisbon in the zeal and ability with which they have brought to light their ancient records, and elucidated the history and antiquities of their respective countries. There was one most important subject from which men of letters were compelled to refrain ... the old free constitution: but it met them every where in their researches; and its restoration was the object of their wishes, if not of their hopes.

?Morals of the lower classes.?

The lower classes, who in great cities are every where too generally depraved, were perhaps peculiarly so in Spain, from the effect of what may be called their vulgar, rather than their popular, literature. This had assumed a curious and most pernicious character, arising partly from the disregard in which ill-executed laws must always be held, and partly from the faith of the people in the efficacy of absolution. The ruffian and the bravo were the personages of those ballads which were strung for sale along dead walls in frequented streets, and vended by blind hawkers about the country. In these pieces, which, as they were written by men in low life for readers of their own level, represent accurately the state of vulgar feeling, the robberies and murders which the hero commits are described as so many brave exploits performed in his vocation; and, at the conclusion, he is always delivered over safely to the priest, but seldom to the hangman. Fables of a like tendency were not unfrequently chosen by their dramatists for the sake of flattering some fashionable usage of superstition, such as the adoration of the cross and the use of the rosary; and the villain who, in the course of the drama, has perpetrated every imaginable crime, is exhibited at the catastrophe3 as a saint by virtue of one of these redeeming practices. Such works were more widely injurious in their tendency than any of those which the Inquisition suppressed. They infected the minds of the people; and the surest course by which a coxcomb in low life could excite admiration and envy among his compeers was by appearing habitually to set justice at defiance. It became a fashion among some of the higher classes in Spain to imitate4 these wretches; and, by a stranger and more deplorable perversion of nature, women were found among those of distinguished rank, who affected the dress and the manners of the vilest of their sex. No such depravity was known in Portugal: the court set an example of decorum and morality there; and as there were fewer large towns, in proportion to the size of the kingdom, there was consequently less corruption among the people.

?National character unchanged.?

Travellers, forming their hasty estimate from the inhabitants of sea-ports and great cities, have too generally agreed in reviling the Portugueze and Spaniards; but if they whose acquaintance with these nations was merely superficial have been disposed to depreciate and despise them, others who dwelt among them always became attached to the people, and bore willing and honourable testimony to the virtues of the national character. It was indeed remarkable how little this had partaken of the national decay. The meanest peasant knew that his country had once been prosperous and powerful; he was familiar with the names of its heroes; and he spake of the days that were past with a feeling which was the best omen for those that were to come.

?Both countries in an improving state.?

Such was the moral and intellectual state of the peninsular kingdoms toward the close of the eighteenth century. There was not the slightest appearance of improvement in the principles of the government or in the administration of justice; but, if such a disposition had arisen, no nations could have been in a more favourable state for the views of a wise minister and an enlightened sovereign. For the whole people were proudly and devoutly attached to the institutions of their country; there existed among them neither sects, nor factions, nor jarring interests; they were one-hearted in all things which regarded their native land; individuals felt for its honour as warmly as for their own; and obedience to their sovereign was with them equally a habit and a principle. In spite of the blind and inveterate despotism of the government, the mal-administration of the laws, and the degeneracy of the higher classes, both countries were in a state of slow, but certain, advancement; of which, increasing commerce, reviving literature, humaner manners, and mitigated bigotry were unequivocal indications. In this state they were found when France was visited by the most tremendous revolution that history has recorded, ... a revolution which was at once the consequence and the punishment of its perfidious policy, its licentiousness, and its irreligion.

?Both become subservient to France.?

It was soon seen that this revolution threatened to propagate itself throughout the whole civilised world. The European governments combined against it; their views were discordant, their policy was erroneous, their measures were executed as ill as they were planned: a master-mind was equally wanting in the cabinet and in the field. In the hour of trial the Spanish court perceived the inefficiency of its organized force; and having neither wisdom to understand the strength of the nation, nor courage and virtue to rely upon it, it concluded a disastrous war by a dishonourable peace. From that time its councils were directed by France, and its treasures were at the disposal of the same domineering ally. A war against England, undertaken upon the most frivolous pretexts, and ruinous to its interests, was the direct consequence; and when, after the experimental peace of Amiens, hostilities were renewed between France and England, Spain had again to experience the same fatal results of the dependence to which her cabinet had subjected her. Portugal had purchased peace with less apparent dishonour, because the terms of the bargain were not divulged; but there also the government soon found that in such times to be weak is to be miserable: it was compelled to brook the ostentatious insolence of the French ambassadors, and to pay large sums for the continuance of a precarious neutrality whenever France thought proper to extort them; for the system of Europe had now been overthrown, and the laws of nations were trampled under foot. A military power, more formidable than that of Rome in its height of empire, of Zingis, or of Timour, had been established in France upon the wreck of all her ancient institutions; and this power was directed by the will of an individual the most ambitious of the human race, who was intoxicated with success, and whose heart and conscience were equally callous.

?Causes of the French Revolution.?

Many causes combined in producing the French revolution: the example of a licentious court had spread like a pestilence through the country; impiety was in fashion among the educated classes; and the most abominable publications were circulated among the ignorant with as much zeal as if a conspiracy had actually been formed for the subversion of social order, by removing from mankind all restraints of morality, of religion, and of decency. Things were in this condition when France took part in the American war; a measure to which Louis XVI. reluctantly consented, because he felt in his heart its injustice, and had perhaps an ominous sentiment of its impolicy. The seeds of republicanism and revolution were thus imported by the government itself, and they fell upon a soil which was prepared for them. Financial difficulties increased; state quacks were called in; a legislative assembly was convoked in a kingdom where none of the inhabitants had been trained to legislation; and the fatal error was committed of uniting the three estates in one chamber, whereby the whole power was transferred to the commons. There was a generous feeling at that time abroad, from which much good might have been educed, had there been ability to have directed it, and if the heart of the country had not been corrupted. Nothing was heard except the praises of freedom and liberality, and professions of the most enlarged and cosmopolitan philanthropy. The regenerated nation even renounced for the future, all offensive war by a legislative act: they fancied that the age of political redemption was arrived, and they announced the Advent of Liberty, with peace on earth, good will towards men. They themselves seemed to believe that the Millennium of Philosophy was begun; and so in other countries the young and ardent, and the old who had learned no lessons from history, believed with them. But the consequences which Burke predicted from changes introduced with so much violence, and so little forethought, followed in natural and rapid succession. ?Progress of the French revolution.? The constitutionalists, who had supposed that it is as easy to remodel the institutions of a great kingdom in practice as in theory, were driven from the stage by bolder innovators; and these in their turn yielded to adventurers more profligate and more daring than themselves. Nobility was abolished; monarchy was overthrown; the church was plundered; the clergy were proscribed; atheism was proclaimed; the king and queen were put to death, after a mockery of judicial forms; the dauphin slowly murdered by systematic ill-usage; a plaster statue of Liberty was set up in Paris; and in the course of two years more than fifteen hundred persons were beheaded at the feet of that statue, men and women indiscriminately. The frenzy spread throughout all France. In the wholesale butcheries which were reported to the National Convention, by its agents, as so many triumphs of equality and justice, not less than eighteen thousand lives were sacrificed by the executioner. It seemed as if God had abandoned the unhappy nation who had denied Him, and that they were delivered over, as the severest chastisement, to the devices of their own hearts. Before this madness was exhausted, the wretches who had thrust themselves into the government paid the earthly penalty of their guilty elevation. One faction did justice upon another: in the same place where dogs had licked the blood of Louis and his queen, there in succession did they lick the blood of Brissot, Danton, Hebert, Robespierre, and their respective associates. When the theorists, the fanatics, and the bolder villains, had perished, a set of intriguers, who had accommodated themselves in turn to all, came forward, and divided the spoil; till the unhappy nation, disgusted with such intrigues, and weary of perpetual changes, acquiesced with joy in the usurpation of a military adventurer, which promised them stability, at least, if not repose.

?Character of Napoleon Buonaparte.?

The revolution had given the government absolute command over the whole physical force of France; and this prodigious power was now at the disposal of an individual unchecked by any restraint, and subject to no responsibility. Perhaps it would not have been possible to have selected among the whole human race any other man, to whom it would have been so dangerous to commit this awful charge. Napoleon Buonaparte possessed all the qualities which are required to form a perfect tyrant. His military genius was of the highest order; his talents were of the most imposing kind; his ambition insatiable; his heart impenetrable: he was without honour, without veracity, without conscience; looking for no world beyond the present, and determined to make this world his own, at whatever cost. The military executions committed in Italy by his orders had shown his contempt for the established usages of war, the law of nations, and the common feelings of humanity: the suppression of the Papal government, the usurpation of the Venetian states, and the seizure of Malta, had proved that neither submissiveness nor treaties afforded any protection against this fit agent of a rapacious and unprincipled democracy. ?His crimes in Egypt and Syria.? But it was during the Egyptian expedition that the whole atrocity of his character was displayed. He landed in Egypt, proclaiming that he was the friend of the Grand Seignior, and that the French were true Mussulmen, who honoured Mahommed and the Koran. His first act was to storm a city belonging to the Grand Seignior, which he never summoned to surrender, and which was incapable of defence. The butchery was continued for some hours after the resistance had ceased. The very perpetrators of this carnage have related that they put to death old and young, men, women, and children, in the mosques, whither these unoffending and helpless wretches had fled to implore protection from God and from their prophet; and they have avowed that this was done deliberately, for the purpose of astonishing the people. Thus it was that Buonaparte commenced his career in Egypt. He left Alexandria, exclaiming, “The Virtues are on our side! Glory to Allah,” he said; “there is no other God but God: Mahommed is his prophet, and I am his friend.” He proclaimed to the Egyptians that Destiny directed all his operations, and had decreed from the beginning of the world, that after beating down the Cross, he should come into that country to fulfil the task assigned him; and he called upon them to enjoy the blessings of a system, in which the wisest and the most virtuous were to govern, and the people were to be happy. It is literally true, that the Egyptian mothers mutilated or killed their daughters, to save them from the brutality of his troops; and that wherever the French moved, a flock of kites and vultures followed, sure of the repast which these purveyors every where provided for them. Their general entered Syria, took Jaffa by assault, and issued a proclamation upon its capture, professing that he would be “clement and merciful, after the example of God.” Four days after the capture, and after that profession of clemency had been made, he drew out his prisoners, some three thousand in number, and had them deliberately slaughtered. A whole division of his army was employed in this massacre; and when their cartridges were exhausted, they finished the work with the bayonet and the sword, dragging away those who had expired, in order to get at the living, who, in the hope of escaping death, had endeavoured to hide themselves under the bodies of the dead. To complete this monster’s character, it was only needful that he should show himself as inhuman toward his own soldiers as his prisoners; and that it might be complete in all parts, this proof of his disposition was not wanting. When Sir Sidney Smith and Captain Wright, then Sir Sidney’s lieutenant, compelled him to raise the siege of Acre, the sick and wounded in his army were more than he had means of removing: any other general would have recommended them to the humanity of an English enemy; but this would have been humiliating to Buonaparte, and therefore poison was administered to them by his orders.

?Opportunity of redeeming his character at the peace of Amiens.?

Yet this man, like Augustus, had an opportunity of earthly redemption afforded him; and, while he fabricated for himself a splendid fortune, might have deserved the gratitude of Europe, not only in the existing generation, but through after ages. When he had attained the supreme authority, he might have restored the Bourbons in France, and taken Italy for his own reward: an arrangement, for which no fresh act of injustice would have been required; which none whom it offended would have been able to oppose; and which, more than any other conceivable alteration in the state of Christendom, might have tended to the general good. Here was an object worthy of ambition, and a richer prize than military ambition had ever yet achieved: so great would have been the public benefit; so signal and durable the individual glory. Even if, incapable as he was of aiming at such true greatness, he could have contented himself with the situation in which he was recognized by the peace of Amiens, and have borne his faculties meekly in that unexampled elevation, the world is charitable to all extremes of fortune, and would have forgiven his former crimes; which, public and notorious as they were, were loudly denied by his advocates, and already disbelieved by his infatuated admirers. But the heart of Napoleon Buonaparte was evil; he regarded his fellow-creatures merely as instruments for gratifying his desire of empire, ... pieces with which he played the game of war: in the presumptuousness of his power he set man at defiance, and in his philosophy God was left out of the account. Unhappily, the internal circumstances of France accorded but too well in all things with the disposition and the views of its autocrat.

?Military power of France.?

The revolutionary governments, through all their changes, had steadily pursued the favourite object of placing the military establishment of the country upon the most formidable footing, and thereby enabling France to give laws to the rest of Europe. During the first years, immense armies were filled with enthusiastic volunteers; and before that spirit exhausted itself, provision was made for permanently supporting so disproportionate a force by means of the conscription. The conscription originated in Prussia, when Prussia was under a mere military despotism; it was now carried to its utmost extent in France. The law declared that every Frenchman was a soldier, and bound to defend his country; but the principle of general law which the latter clause of the sentence announces served to introduce a code, whereby the whole youth of France were placed at the disposal of the government, to be sent whithersoever its ambitious projects might extend, ... to the sands of Egypt, or the snows of Moscovy. A view of this system will equally elucidate the strength, the resources, and the character, of the French government during these disastrous years.

?System of military conscription.?

Under the new arrangement of its territory, France was divided into departments, districts, cantons, and municipalities. The departments were governed by a prefect, and a council of prefecture; the districts by a sub-prefect and his council; the cantons and municipalities by a mayor and town-court; to which were added, on the part of the general government, a commissary of police, and his adjuncts. There was also a military division of the country into thirty districts, each under a general of division, with a long establishment of commissaries, inspectors, and military police-officers. On a certain day in every year, notice was given in every municipality that all men, between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, should within eight days appear at the town-house, and enrol their names: if any individual failed, not he alone, but his family also, were subject to a criminal prosecution. The names of the absent were to be enrolled by their nearest relations, and concealment was thus rendered impossible: the man who was not in his usual domicile being doubly registered; as an absentee in one place, and as a temporary sojourner in another. From these registers the returns for the conscription were prepared in five lists, according to age, and the names in each were carefully arranged according to seniority. The civil officers by whom these lists were formed were responsible for any omission; and, as a farther precaution, every village and every house was visited at stated and at unexpected times, publicly and secretly. After such preparations, the machine was easily put in motion. The war-minister gave notice what number of men were required; the senate voted them from the conscripts of that year which was next in course, and the prefects were ordered to provide their contingents: they called upon the sub-prefects; these again upon the municipalities; and within sixteen days from the date of the prefect’s orders, the ballot took place. Tickets, numbered to the amount of all who were upon the list, were put into the urn, and the men were registered in the order of the numbers which they had drawn. The first numbers, up to the sum required, were for immediate service; the others were to be called upon in sequence, in case of necessity only: but, under Buonaparte, that necessity always existed. They were marched off under military escort, and distributed among the artillery, cuirassiers, dragoons, infantry, or sappers and miners, according to their stature and bodily strength.

?Exemptions.?

The infirmities which might be pleaded as exemptions were severely scrutinized, and were determined by the law with critical inhumanity: inveterate asthma, habitual spitting of blood, and incipient consumption only entitled the sufferer to a provisional dispensation. Men who were incapable of enduring the fatigues of war, or who might be more useful to the state in pursuing their own employments or their studies, were allowed to provide substitutes or purchase an exemption by the payment of three hundred francs; but this was an early law, and it is not likely that the pecuniary alternative was ever accepted when the waste of men became excessive. ?Substitutes.? The substitute was required to be a Frenchman, between twenty-five and forty years of age (and therefore not liable to the conscription), not below five feet one, of a strong constitution, and in robust health. In addition to his own name, he was to take that of the person for whom he served, and by that name he was to be known in the army: the principal was still upon the list, and subject to be called upon if his representative deserted or withdrew; nor could he obtain a definitive exemption unless he produced proof that the substitute had either been killed or disabled in service, or had served the full time which the laws required; during war the term was indefinite, in peace it was fixed at five years. During the latter years of Buonaparte’s government men who could be admitted as substitutes were necessarily so rare, that their price rose from two hundred to a thousand Napoleons.

?Punishments for evading the conscription.?

No constituted authority, no branch of the civil or military administration, might retain in its service a conscript who was called upon in his turn. No Frenchman, being, or having been, liable to the conscription, could hold any public office, or receive any public salary, or exercise public rights, or receive a legacy, or inherit property, unless he produced a certificate that he had conformed to the law, and either was actually in service, or had obtained his dismissal, or was legally exempted, or that his services had not been required. They who failed to join the army within the time prescribed were deprived of their civil rights, a circular description of their persons was sent to all the chiefs of the gendarmerie throughout the empire, and they were pursued as deserters. Eleven depÔts were appointed, where these refractory conscripts were disciplined in an uniform of disgrace, with the hair cut close: they were employed upon the fortifications, or in other hard labour, for which they received no additional pay or rations. This, however, was thought too lenient when the emperor’s expenditure of men became more lavish, and it was then decreed that such offenders were to be punished as if they had actually deserted. ?Punishments for desertion.? A deserter was condemned to a fine of fifteen hundred francs, chargeable upon whatever property might fall to him at any future time, if he was not able to pay it immediately. In addition to this fine, the punishment for the simple offence of deserting into the interior was three years’ labour upon the public works. The culprits wore a particular uniform, and were allowed shoes; their heads were shaved every eighth day, and they were not permitted either to shave their beards or to cut them. Their rations were the soldiers’ bread, rice, or dry pulse; their pay half that of a common labourer; and of this a third was withheld till they should have served out their time, a third was deducted for their expenses, and the remainder was all which they had for purchasing better food than their miserable allowance. He who had deserted from the army, or a frontier place, or in a direction toward the enemy, or with a companion, or who had scaled ramparts in effecting his escape, was sentenced to public labour for ten years, with a bullet of eight pounds weight fastened to him by a chain eight feet long. He was to work eight hours a day during five months, ten during the better part of the year, and to be chained in prison all the rest of the time: he wore wooden shoes, and an uniform differing both in colour and fashion from that of the troops; his mustachios, as well as his head, were shaved every eight days; his beard was never shaved, nor shorn, nor shortened; his rations and pay were like those of the common deserters, because, indeed, life could not be supported upon less. The punishment of death, which was inflicted upon those who had deserted to the enemy, and in other aggravated cases, was mercy when compared to this.

?Effect of this system.?

By the operation of this system the French were made a military nation, a change equally inconsistent with their own welfare and with the safety and independence of the surrounding states. Beginning at first with all men between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, enrolling the whole rising generation afterwards as they attained to manhood, and retaining all who were embodied as long as their services were required, in other words, as long as they were capable of serving, ... the government had thus brought within its disposal every man who was capable of bearing arms; and this was the tremendous power which Buonaparte found already organized to his heart’s desire when he assumed the supreme authority. Such power might have kindled ambition in an ordinary mind; no wonder then that the most ambitious of the human race, when he saw himself in possession of it, supposed universal empire to be within his reach. His supply of men might well appear inexhaustible: there was neither difficulty nor expense in raising them; he had only to say what number he required, and the rest was mere matter of routine. ?War made to support itself.? After his armies had once passed the frontier, there was no cost in maintaining them; war was made to support itself. This system also had been matured for him by his republican predecessors. The contributions which he levied upon conquered or dependent states discharged the soldiers’ pay: in an ally’s country their subsistence was expected as a proof of alliance; in an enemy’s it was taken as the right of war. And the perfection of the French commissariat was admired and extolled in England as a masterpiece of arrangement by the blind admirers of France, who either did not or would not perceive how easy the duties of that department were made, when every demand was enforced by military power, and nothing was paid for.

?Former constitution of the French army.?

When Louis XVI. began his unhappy reign, the French army was still constituted upon a feudal principle which had been well adapted to the circumstances of later times. The corps were divided into proprietary companies, the captains of which, receiving pay proportionate to the required expenditure, provided every thing for the men, and raised them among their own vassals. The system was liable to abuse, but it had great advantages: for if the captain should act upon no worthier motive than mere selfishness, it was his interest to be careful of his men, lest he should incur the expense of recruiting them; and it might reasonably be expected that he would treat them kindly to prevent desertion, and that he would spare no means for keeping them in health or restoring them in sickness. But there were better principles brought into action: the character both of the captain and of the men, in their native place, depended upon what each should report of the other; the men also knew that their fidelity would not be forgotten when their services were over, and that, if they fell, their good conduct would be remembered to the benefit of their family. Both parties were always in the presence of that little world, to the opinion of which they were more immediately amenable, and from which applause or condemnation would most sensibly affect them; and local and hereditary attachments, with all their strength and endurance, were thus brought into the service of the state. ?Change introduced by M. de St. Germaine.? The system was abolished when M. de St. Germaine was minister at war, for the sake of some sordid speculations upon clothing and victualling the troops. Subalterns, who were learning their profession, and acquiring the love and confidence of the soldiers, were disbanded as a sacrifice to the prevailing fashion of economical reform: at the same time the penal discipline of the Germans was introduced, ... a poor substitution for the old bonds of feeling which had been thus rudely broken; and while all that was useful in the feudal constitution of the army was discarded, the worst part was retained by an order that no person should hold a commission unless he could prove the nobility of his family for four generations.

?Levelling principle of the revolutionary service.?

The republicans naturally went into the other extreme; and Buonaparte retained in his army the levelling principle which the revolution had introduced, because it is as congenial to a despotism as to a democracy. No Frenchman could be made an officer (except in the artillery and engineers) till he had served three years as a private or sub-officer, unless he signalized himself in action. Perhaps the conscription, in its full extent, could never have been established without such a regulation. It rendered the military service less odious to the common people, who saw the children of the higher classes thus placed upon a level with themselves, and who were deceived into an opinion that merit was the only means of promotion: it brought also into the ranks a degree of intelligence and ambition not to be found there in armies which are differently composed; and those qualities were a security for discipline and perfect obedience under circumstances in which ordinary troops might have become impatient of continual privations. But it may well be doubted, on the other hand, whether the officers derived any important advantage from being trained in the ranks; and there can be no doubt that any such advantage would be dearly purchased by the degradation to which they were exposed; for, while the soldiery were materially improved by the mixture of wellborn men who looked for promotion, these persons themselves were more materially injured by the inevitable effects of a system which levelled nothing so effectually as it did the manners, the moral feeling, and the sense of honour.

?Honourable character of the old French army.?

The policy of the old French government had often been detestably perfidious, and yet French history abounds with examples of high chivalrous sentiment; and nowhere were men to be found more sensible of what was due to their king, their country, and themselves, more alive to the sense of national and individual honour, than in the old French army. A fatal change was produced by the revolution. At a time when all persons of high birth were objects of persecution or suspicion, men from the lowest occupations were hurried into the highest posts in the army. Many of them were possessed of great military talents, and there were some few who in every respect proved worthy of their fortune. But there were others who never cast the slough of their old habits: no service was too bloody or too base for such agents; and, without feeling shame for the employment, or compunction for the crime, they were ready to obey their remorseless master in whatever he might command, ... the individual murders of Palm and the Duc d’Enghein, or the wholesale massacres of Jaffa and of Madrid, and those other atrocious actions in Portugal and Spain, of which this history records the progress and the punishment.

It was observed by Montesquieu, that honour, which is the moving and preserving principle of monarchy, is not, and cannot be, the principle of despotism. Little did he apprehend how soon the state of his own country would exemplify the maxim. Among military bodies, honour had hitherto supplied, however imperfectly, yet in some degree, the place of a higher and nobler principle: but under the tyranny of Buonaparte, while his measures tended directly, as if they had been so designed, to subvert this feeling (already weakened by the false philosophy of the age), there remained nothing in its stead except that natural goodness, and that innate sense of rectitude, which, in certain happy natures, can never be totally extinguished, but which, in the vast majority of mankind, are easily deadened and destroyed. The humaner studies, whereby the manners and the minds of men are softened, and the sacred precepts whereby they are purified and exalted and enlightened, had been the one neglected, and the other proscribed, during the revolution; and a generation had grown up, without literature, without morals, and without religion.

Education had been chiefly in the hands of the Jesuits till the extinction of that famous company, the most active, the most intriguing, but in later times the most useful and the most calumniated of the monastic orders. After their dissolution, the system was continued upon the same plan, though perhaps with inferior ability, and the colleges were every where conducted by the clergy, either secular or regular. The massacre of St. Bartholomew’s day, and the dragonades of Louis XIV., are crimes always to be remembered with unabating and unqualified detestation. Even at a later time it was evinced, in the shocking tragedies at Rouen and Thoulouse, that the same spirit existed in the French church, and was ready to blaze out. These execrable things were known over Europe; but it was not so generally known, that in the service of that same church which had dishonoured itself, and outraged human nature, by these actions, many thousand ministers were continually employed in training the young, visiting the sick, relieving the poor, consoling the penitent, and reclaiming the sinner; uninfluenced by love of gain, hope of applause or of advancement, or any worldly motive; but patiently and dutifully devoting themselves in obscurity to the service of their fellow-creatures and their God. The knowledge of their virtues was confined to the little sphere wherein their painful and meritorious lives were passed; and the world knew them not, till they were hunted out by the atheistical persecution, and were found to endure wrongs, insults, outrages, exiles, and death, with the meekness of Christians, and the heroism of martyrs.

Under these teachers, the doctrines of Christianity, according to the Romish church, and the duties of Christianity, wherein all churches are agreed, were the first things inculcated, as being the first things needful. Errors of doctrine, though of tremendous importance when men are actuated by blind zeal, are, among the quiet and humble-minded part of mankind, latent principles which produce no evil, unless some unhappy circumstance calls them into action: but the moral influence of religion is felt in the whole tenour of public and of private life. There were endowed schools and colleges, before the revolution, in every part of France, chiefly under the direction of persons who acted from motives of duty and conscience, rather than of worldly interest. The French court, in the midst of its own licentiousness, understood the importance of training up the people in a faith which tended to make them good subjects, and therefore it had provided5 for this great object from a sense of policy, if from no better impulse. ?The whole system of education destroyed by the revolution.? The reformers, in the natural course of political insanity, plundered the church before the revolutionists overthrew the throne. The Constituent Assembly followed up this act of iniquity by requiring from the clergy an oath, which they knew the greater part must conscientiously refuse to take. The whole system of education throughout France was thus subverted, before the work of proscription and massacre began; and, to complete the wreck, the National Convention, by one sweeping decree, suppressed all colleges and faculties of theology, medicine, arts, and jurisprudence, throughout the republic.

Public instruction, however, had been one of the first blessings which were promised under the new order of things; and accordingly plan after plan was pompously announced, as short-lived constitutions and short-sighted legislators succeeded one another. ?Talleyrand’s scheme.? The Constituent Assembly promised an establishment of primary schools in the chief place of every canton; secondary ones in the capital of every district; department schools in the capitals of these larger divisions; and, finally, an Institute in the metropolis: the whole under a Commission of Public Instruction. Public tuition was not to begin before the age of six; till which time, it was said, mothers might be trusted to put in practice the immortal lessons of the author of Emilius: and girls were left wholly to their parents. ?Religion omitted.? Religion made no part of the scheme6; and instead of teaching children faith, hope, and charity, their duties toward God and man, the Declaration of Rights was to be cast into a catechism for their use. This plan, which was the work of Talleyrand, was thrown aside when the Constituent Assembly, having completed, as they supposed, the work of demolition, made way for the Legislative Assembly, which was to erect a new edifice from the ruins. ?Condorcet’s scheme.? A second project was then presented by Condorcet. ?Religion proscribed.? Revealed religion was, of course, proscribed from his scheme; and the miserable sophist said that this proscription ought to be extended to what is called natural religion also, because the theistic philosophers were no better agreed than the theologians in their notions of God, and of his moral relations to mankind. All prejudices, he said, ought now to disappear; and therefore it must now be affirmed that the study of the ancient languages would be more injurious than useful. The physical sciences were the basis of his plan; and he advised that scientific lessons should be given in public weekly lectures, and that the miracles of Elijah and St. Januarius should be exhibited, in order to cure the people of superstition. A time, he said, undoubtedly would come, when all establishments for instruction would be useless: however, as they were necessary at present, girls as well as boys were to be received in the public schools. ?Scheme of the National Convention.? The orators of the National Convention went farther: they maintained, that domestic education was incompatible with liberty; that the holy doctrine of equality would have been proclaimed in vain if there were any difference of education between the rich and the poor; that, of all inequalities, the inequality of knowledge was the most fatal; and that every thing which elevated one man above another in the scale of intellect was studiously to be destroyed. All children, therefore, of both sexes, ... the boys from the age of five till that of twelve, the girls from five to eleven, ... ought to be educated in common at the expense of the republic; there was room enough for lodging them all in the palaces and castles of the emigrants; the boys should be employed in tilling the earth, in manufactures, or in picking stones upon the highways; hospitals were to be annexed to the schools, where the children were in rotation to wait upon the sick and the aged; and they were never to hear of religion. One democratic legislator proposed, that those parents who chose to have their children educated at home should be vigilantly observed; and if it were discovered that they brought them up in principles contrary to liberty, that a process should be instituted, and the children taken from them, and sent to the houses of equality. This implied some choice on the part of the parents, though it would have made the choice a cruel mockery: but it was contended that liberty could not exist if domestic education were tolerated; ?Domestic education proscribed.? and when the clause was proposed that parents might send their children to these schools, it was carried as an amendment that they must send them, because it was time to establish the great principle, that children belong to the republic more than to their parents. This, said one of their blasphemous declaimers, would complete the Gospel of Equality! It was even maintained, that education ought to commence before birth; and the philosophical statesmen of regenerated France were called upon to form rules for women during the time of gestation, and to enact laws for midwives and for nurses7!

Follies and schemes like these were discussed by the National Convention in the intervals between their acts of confiscation and blood; and to this intolerable tyranny the fanatics of liberty and equality designed to subject the people in the dearest and holiest relations of domestic life! But proscriptions and executions succeeded so rapidly, that the various projectors were swept off before their projects could be attempted in practice; till at length, when the remaining members of that nefarious assembly, after the death of Robespierre, had acquired some feeling of personal safety, the Normal Schools were established, in which the art of teaching was to be taught. ?Normal Schools.? And now, it was proclaimed, the regeneration of the human mind would be effected; now, for the first time upon earth, Nature, Truth, Reason, and Philosophy would have their seminary! The most eminent men in talents and science were to be professors in this institution; from all parts of the republic the most promising subjects were to be selected by the constituted authorities, and sent to the metropolis as pupils: and when they should have completed the course of human knowledge, the disciples of these great masters, thoroughly imbued with the lessons which they had received, were to return to their respective places of abode, and repeat them throughout the land, which would thus, in its remotest parts, receive light from Paris, as from the focus of intellectual illumination. Fourteen hundred young men were in fact brought from the country; and, that nothing might be lost to mankind, the conferences in which universal instruction was to be communicated were minuted in short-hand. So notable a plan excited great enthusiasm in Paris; it soon excited as much ridicule: in the course of three months both pupils and professors discovered in how absurd a situation they were placed; it was acknowledged in the National Convention that the scheme had altogether failed; and thus ended what was properly called the organized quackery of the Normal Schools8.

Meantime the irrecoverable years were passing on, and the rising generation was sacrificed to the crude theories and ridiculous experiments of sophists in power; men whose ignorance might deserve compassion, if their absurdity did not provoke indignation as well as contempt, and their presumptuous wickedness call for unmingled abhorrence. When the subject was renewed under the consular government, the frightful consequences had become too plain to be dissembled. A view of the moral and religious state of France was drawn up from official reports which were sent in from every department, and it was acknowledged that the children throughout the republic had been left to run wild in idleness during the whole preceding course of the revolution. ?Analyse des PrÒces VÉrbaux, quoted by Portalis. L. Goldsmith, Recueil, T. i. p. 282.? “They are without the idea of a God,” said the Report, “without a notion of right and wrong. The barbarous manners which have thus arisen have produced a ferocious people, and we cannot but groan over the evils which threaten the present generation and the future.”

It suited the views of Buonaparte that his government should hold this language while he was negotiating the Concordat, for the sake of obtaining the papal sanction to his authority. Perhaps he was then hesitating whether to take the right hand way or the left; whether to build up again the ruined institutions of France, strengthen the throne on which he had resolved to take his seat by an alliance with the altar; and in restoring to the kingdom all that it was possible to restore while he retained the sovereignty to himself, engraft upon the new dynasty those principles which had given to the old its surest strength when it was strongest, and a splendour, of which no change of fortune could deprive it. Two parties would be equally opposed to this, the Jacobines and the Royalists. The latter it was impossible to conciliate: they would have stood by the crown even if it were hanging upon a bush; but their allegiance being founded upon principle and feeling, ... upon the sense of honour and of duty, ... would not follow the crown when it was transferred by violence and injustice from one head to another. He found the Jacobines more practicable. They indeed had many sympathies with Buonaparte: he favoured that irreligion to which they were fanatically attached, because it at once flattered their vanity and indulged their vices; his schemes of conquest offered a wide field for their ambition and their avarice: and what fitter agents could he desire than men who were troubled with no scruples of conscience or of honour; whom no turpitude could make ashamed; who shrunk from no crimes, and were shocked by no atrocities? Thus Buonaparte judged concerning them, and he reasoned rightly. The Jacobines both at home and abroad became his most devoted and obsequious adherents: they served him in England as partizans and advocates, denying or extenuating his crimes, justifying his measures, magnifying his power, and reviling his opponents; on the Continent they co-operated with him by secret or open treason, as occasion offered; in France they laid aside in his behalf that hatred to monarchy which they had not only professed but sworn, and swearing allegiance to a military despotism, gave that despotism their willing and zealous support.

Such persons were still a minority in France; but their activity, their arts, and their audacity supplied the want of numbers. It was essential to his views that a succession of such men should be provided, and that the French nation should by the sure process of education be moulded to his will, and made to receive the stamp of his iron institutions. Many of the clergy, when the proscription which had driven them from their country was removed, had opened schools on their return from exile, as the readiest means of obtaining a maintenance for themselves and of performing their Christian duties. Their success was incompatible with Buonaparte’s policy: he wanted not a moral and a religious9, but a military people. After some preparatory attempts, all tending to the same object, the Imperial University was established; ... a name which, it was admitted, had altogether a different signification from what it bore under the old order of things. The legitimate principle was proclaimed, that the direction of public education belongs to the state; the intolerant one was deduced and put in practice, that therefore a monopoly of education should be vested in the new establishment.

At the head of this University there was a Grand Master, for whom Buonaparte, indulging in such things his own taste as well as that of the French people, appointed a splendid costume; his civil-list was 150,000 francs, and he had the power of nominating to all the inferior appointments, ... an enormous influence, if it had been intended that he should be any thing more than the mere organ of the Emperor’s will. There were under him a chancellor, a treasurer, with salaries of 15,000 francs each; ten counsellors for life, twenty counsellors in ordinary, the former with salaries of 10, the latter of 6,000 francs; and thirty inspectors general, whose salary was 6,000 also, and whose travelling expenses were paid. Next in rank were the Rectors of Academies: this too was an old word with a new signification. There were to be as many Academies in the empire as there were courts of appeal. Each Rector had an establishment for his inferior jurisdiction analogous to that of the Grand Master; his salary was 6,000 francs, with 3,000 for his official expenses, and the additional emolument which he derived as Dean of the Faculties. He ranked with the Bishop of the diocese; and the rivalry which this pretension occasioned was in no degree mitigated by the spirit in which the Imperial University was founded and administered. The Faculties, or Schools of Theology, Jurisprudence, Medicine, Physical Sciences, and Literature, were under the Rector’s authority, as were the Lyceums, Colleges, Institutions, Pensions, and even the Primary Schools, which were not considered as beneath the cognizance of the University, although the government had taken care that even these should not be under the direction of the clergy, having committed them to the superintendence of a certain number of inhabitants, among whom the parochial priest had only a single voice. All seminaries, therefore, of every kind belonged to the University, and contributed in no small degree to its revenues. For it was not only required that every person who opened a Pension or Institution must be a graduate, but also that he must take out a brevet from the Grand Master, the price of which varied from 200 to 600 francs, and which was to be renewed at the same cost every ten years. Besides these decennial droits, a fourth part of the same sum was exacted annually; and a tax was levied upon the pupils of five per cent. upon what they paid to the master. It was the purpose of the government to discourage these schools, which, as being mostly in the hands of the clergy, were nowise congenial with the principles and views of Buonaparte: therefore they were thus heavily taxed; and lest they should be supported in spite of all discouragement, a decree was issued, declaring that the Lyceums might at any time fill up their numbers by taking from the nearest Pensions or Institutions as many pupils above the age of nine as would complete their complement. The precise effect of this iniquitous decree was, that exactly in proportion as any particular Lyceum was known to be ill conducted, and as parents were unwilling to entrust their children there, it became impossible for any better seminary to exist in its neighbourhood.

There were two other kind of seminaries which it was in like manner the intention of the Imperial government to destroy by indirect means, ... the Communal Colleges and the Ecclesiastical Schools. More than four hundred of the former had been founded at the expense of their respective communes, as soon as any hope appeared that a settled order of things might be maintained in France. But because every thing far and near was regulated by the new despotism, the money which they levied upon themselves for this purpose went, like other imposts, to the capital: and was thrown into a common fund, from whence an allowance to each particular college was made, not according to its necessary expenditure, but according to the pleasure of the minister to whom the distribution was confided. Thus the design of starving the colleges, and rendering the communes weary of a voluntary tax from which no benefit was derived, was in most cases easily effected; and where the inhabitants of a town, being more desirous of supporting such an establishment, supplied the deficiency of the fund by fresh subscriptions, the University interfered, to harass and disgust them by means contradictory in appearance, but tending to the same end. Being vested with authority over the Regents, it appointed and superseded them at pleasure, removing to the Lyceums those who had deserved the confidence of the neighbourhood, and supplying their place by incompetent and worthless adventurers; it forced upon the colleges professors of sciences which were not taught there, or it forbade them to pursue the same branches of education if they were teaching them with success. Very few of these establishments, and those only in the remotest provinces, escaped the effects of this insidious hostility. ?Ecclesiastical Schools.? The Ecclesiastical Schools had been instituted as seminaries for the priesthood by the Bishops, and were founded and supported by contributions. Some were placed in cities where they were under the Bishop’s immediate inspection, and became especial objects of his care; others were fixed in the country, that they might be removed from the corruption of great towns. The children of the poor who appeared by their talents and disposition to be fit subjects for the ministry, were educated there gratuitously; those of the wealthy for a moderate payment. The Romish clergy have always understood that where religious feeling exists, money is never wanting for religious purposes. Poor as Buonaparte had left the Gallican church, large buildings were now bought or erected for these seminaries, and furnished and supported with a liberality which manifested that in the provinces at least there was more religion than suited the wishes of the imperial government. Effectual means therefore were pursued for degrading and destroying them. It was decreed that not more than one should be allowed in a department, and that that one must be in a large town where there should be a Lyceum: all others were to be shut up within a fortnight after the promulgation of the law, and their property, moveable and immoveable, applied to the use of the University. The pupils were compelled to attend the Lyceums, and go through the same course of mathematical studies as if they had been designed for the army; they were not allowed to keep the church festivals as holidays, although they wore the habit of ecclesiastical students, and their masters were ranked below those of the meanest boarding-school. The object of the government in thus mortifying the teachers would be defeated by the wise policy of the Romish church, which has taught its ministers to regard every act of humiliation as adding to their stock of merits; the design of disgusting the students with their profession, by the contempt to which they were exposed in what were essentially military academies, and of unfitting them for their intended profession by an intercourse with military pupils, was likely to be more successful.

It was through the Lyceums more than any other of his institutions that Buonaparte expected to perpetuate the new order of things: in these academies it was, that, by a system such as a Jesuit might have devised for the use of a Mamaluke Bey, he trained up the youth of France to become men after his own heart. It was laid down as a maxim by the government that all public education ought to be regulated upon the principles of military discipline, not on those of civil or ecclesiastical police. In the Lyceums, therefore, the pupils were distributed not in forms, or classes, but in companies, each having its serjeant and its corporal; and an officer-instructor, as he was called, taught the use of arms to all above twelve years of age, and drilled them in military manoeuvres. He was present to superintend all their movements, which were so many evolutions, or marches. The punishments in use were arrest and imprisonment; and for their meals, their studies, their lessons, their sports, prayers, mass, going to bed, and getting up, signal was given by beat of drum. ?First catechism.? The youth who were thus trained up in military habits had been taught, in their first catechism, that they owed to their Emperor Napoleon love, respect, obedience, fidelity, military services, and the contributions required for the preservation and defence of the empire, and of his throne: that God, who creates empires and disposes of them according to his will, had, by endowing Napoleon with a profusion of gifts as well in peace as in war, made him the minister of his power, and his image upon earth: to honour and serve the Emperor was therefore the same thing as to honour and serve God; and they who violated their duty towards him, would resist the order which God himself had established, and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation. The religious sanction which was thus given to his authority had its full effect in childhood, and when this feeling lost its influence, devotion to the Emperor had become a habit which every thing around them contributed to confirm and strengthen. There were 150 exhibitions, or burses, appointed for every Lyceum: twenty were of sufficient amount to cover the whole expense of the boys’ education and maintenance; the others were called half or three-quarter burses, and the relatives of those who obtained them made up the sum which was deficient. The money for these foundations was of course drawn from the public taxes: a third part was even raised by an extra and specific impost upon the respective communes. But in the eyes of the pupils every thing flowed from the Emperor himself: he was their immediate benefactor, as well as their future and sure patron; and they looked to him with gratitude and hope at an age when these generous feelings are the strongest. ?Special military academies.? Two hundred and fifty chosen youths were transferred every year to the special military academies, where they were supported by the state; and from whence the army was supplied with a succession of young men, thoroughly educated for their profession, and thoroughly attached to the Emperor Napoleon. Others were appointed to such civil offices as they seemed best qualified to fill, and they carried with them the same attachment to revolutionary principles, and to the person of Buonaparte. This was not all. Buonaparte, far-sighted when not blinded by vanity, or dazzled by ambition, made use of the Lyceums to assist in securing his conquests. ?Youths from the conquered countries.? Two thousand four hundred youths, chosen from the foreign territories which had been annexed to France, were educated in these academies at the public expense. This measure, said Fourcroy (by whom the scheme of the University was framed), was so congenial with the times, that its advantages would be perceived by all who were capable of understanding the existing circumstances. The inhabitants, he said, who spake a language of their own, and were accustomed to their own institutions, must relinquish their old usages, and adopt those of their new country: they had not the means at home of giving their children the education, the manners, and the character, which were to identify them with the French. What more advantageous destiny could be prepared for them than that which the new system offered? and what more efficacious resource could be given to the government, which had nothing more at heart than to bind these new citizens to the French empire?... Bound to it, indeed, they would thus be; the youths by the effect of the education which they received; the parents because the children were hostages for their forced allegiance.

Thus was the scheme of the Lyceums well suited both to the foreign and domestic policy of Buonaparte. The tone of morals which prevailed in these academies is said to have been not less congenial to his purposes. If, indeed, in happier countries, and where the intention is that better principles should be carefully inculcated, schools still are places where good dispositions incur some danger of contamination, and where evil ones have their worst propensities nurtured, and forced as if in a hotbed, what was to be expected from a system of education planned and directed by men who had grown up during the revolution, or who had taken part in it, and gone through the course of its crimes, ... its agents, or its creatures? A thorough corruption, under the appearance of that regularity which military order produced; a cold irreligion, with which the youths went through the external practices of devotion as they went through the drill; a calculating spirit of insubordination, never breaking out but in concerted movements; speculating selfishness, premature ambition, ferocious manners; ... ?Genie de la Revolution. T. 1. 392.? these were to be expected, and by these, it is said, the Lyceums were characterised.

The Proviseurs (or masters), the censors, and the teachers in the Lyceums and Colleges (which latter were regarded as secondary schools), were bound to celibacy: the professors might marry, but in that case they were not allowed to lodge within the precincts, nor might any woman enter there. Every academy had one or two inspectors, whose business it was from time to time to visit all the Lyceums and inferior schools within their respective districts, and see that the rules of the University were strictly observed; and lest this examination should be carelessly or unfaithfully performed, there were from twenty to thirty general inspectors. The members of the University were bound each to inform the Grand Master and his officers of any thing contrary to the rules, which might occur within their knowledge: they were bound to obey him in whatever he might command for the Emperor’s service; and whosoever was expelled, or left the University without a letter of dismission, became thereby incapable of holding any civil employment. The pupils were not permitted to correspond with any persons except their parents, or persons acting for their parents; and all letters which they received or wrote passed through the hands of the censor.

The University was one of Buonaparte’s favourite plans: it well exemplifies his precipitate temper and his thorough despotism. In the edict which erected it, the Napoleonic dynasty was styled the conservator of the liberal ideas which the French constitutions had announced; ... that very edict was an act for enforcing uniformity of education throughout the empire! All persons who were previously employed in tuition were by this act incorporated as members of the University, without their consent, and bound to all its regulations: they were compelled to change the course of instruction to which they had been accustomed, and to follow a prescribed form, whether they approved it or not: they were subjected to the inquisitorial visits of the inspectors, and to the arbitrary power of the Grand Master: they were heavily taxed for the support of this system, and ultimately were to be sacrificed to it; for it was the declared intention of government gradually to diminish the number of their schools till they should all be shut up, for the purpose of multiplying the Lyceums. The insolent injustice of such a measure would produce disgust and consequent neglect in many instances, the suddenness of the change would occasion disorder and confusion in all; and the itinerant inspectors were less likely to amend what was amiss, than to act in a vexatious spirit of interference, or with corrupt connivance, according as the views and temper of the individual inclined him to the one abuse or to the other. Except the miserable schoolmasters who were pressed into the University, its other members were taken from such persons hanging loose upon society as had interest enough to obtain the better appointments, or were forlorn enough to accept the worst. Yet from some thousands of men, not prepared by previous habitudes and studies, not selected for the fitness of their acquirements, their talents, or their disposition to the course of life in which they were to be placed, but brought together by the drag-net of despotism, Buonaparte expected and demanded that singleness of purpose, that totality of interests, that subserviency of all the parts to the whole, that disciplined unanimity which had existed among the Jesuits, and was the perfection of their consummate system. But the great object of his policy was answered; the youth of France were brought up in military habits; they were taught from their earliest boyhood to look to him for patronage, and to consider their own advancement as connected with the prosperity and permanence of his empire: if the moral and religious part of their education was worse than neglected, it mattered not, or rather it accorded with his views and wishes; they were then fitter instruments for the work in which they were to be employed.

The revolution had seared the feelings and hardened the hearts of a light-minded people: this was the natural effect of its horrors and of the ruin which it had spread10. That immorality which a succession of vicious courts had encouraged by their example, was released by the revolution from all restraints of law and of external decorum. ?Frequency of divorces.? The religious sanction of marriage was destroyed, and the unbounded facility of divorce rendered the civil ceremony a mere form, which was no longer binding than till one of the parties might choose to throw off the engagement. ?Obscene publications.? The literature of France, always, to the disgrace of the nation, more licentious than that of any other country, became, under the perfect freedom of the press, obscene to a degree too loathsome for expression; the arts were prostituted to the same devilish purpose; and the line of distinction between vice and virtue, which can never be too strongly marked, was as completely effaced in general practice as in the theories of those sophists who have laboured to corrupt their fellow-creatures. Such things were beneath the consideration of a legislature which arrogated to itself the praise of philosophical liberality; or, rather, they accorded with the views of that foul philosophy, which, regarding man as a mere material machine, would degrade him to the condition of the beasts that perish. Gambling, also, which every government that regards the welfare of its subjects endeavours to check by salutary laws, was encouraged by authority in France. ?Gaming-houses established by government.? Every week two or three lotteries were drawn, in which the poorest of the poor were tempted to engage, there being shares as low as sixpence. Nor must it be supposed that this measure was defended upon the specious ground that governments ought to regulate the vices which they cannot prevent, and therefore may allowably make them conducive to the advantage of the state. The French government legalized this vice in its fullest extent, took to itself a monopoly of the gaming-houses, farmed them at one time, and afterwards administered them by agents of its own. This profligate measure originated with the Directory, and was continued by Buonaparte: whatever tended to make men prodigal and desperate accorded with the spirit of his system, and under that system every thing tended to that effect.

Of all the previous measures of the revolutionists there was none which more entirely suited his views than the abolition of the law of primogeniture; that law, which perhaps, next to the institution of marriage, has produced more good, moral and political, than any other act of human legislation. The revolutionists were not mistaken when they believed that that structure of social order which it was their determination to destroy rested upon this basis; and they were too short-sighted to perceive that in breaking it up they were acting as pioneers to prepare the way for despotism. Buonaparte was thus enabled to surround himself with an aristocracy of his own making, who possessed no natural influence in the country, who represented none of its interests, who had no inheritance of honour to maintain and to bequeath, but were his mere creatures and dependents. In this respect the government of France under the Emperor Napoleon was assimilated to the barbarous despotisms of Persia and Turkey: and this was the direct consequence of a measure, which was intended to secure and perpetuate the triumph of liberty and equality! But it was not the only consequence: the evil extended throughout the whole middle class of society. The best motive whereby men are induced to labour for the accumulation of wealth, the motive by which a propensity, mean in itself, is exalted and refined, was removed when the hope of building up a family was taken away. Mansions would not be erected, and domains ornamented and improved, when, upon the death of the proprietor, the estates were to be divided. There no longer existed the same means for that liberal expenditure which called forth ingenuity, encouraged the arts, and afforded employment to useful industry in all its branches. Properties were broken down, which in former times enabled the father to set his younger children fairly forward in the world, and the heads of families to assist their relatives, ... from pride sometimes, if a kindlier principle were wanting. And as estates by this levelling act were divided into smaller and smaller portions at every descent, more adventurers were thrown upon the public with less parental aid. The political system of the revolutionists, like their godless philosophy, looked to the present alone, deriving no wisdom from the past, and having for the future neither care nor hope.

The growth of that middle order was thus prevented in which the strength of civil society mainly consists; which is the most favourable to the developement of our intellectual faculties, and to the improvement of our moral nature; to knowledge, and contentment, and virtue; to public freedom, individual happiness, and general prosperity. No measure could more certainly tend to perpetuate barbarous institutions than one by which property was thus divided in every generation: and the state of things among the Huns and Tartars of old scarcely operated more exclusively to form a military people than all the circumstances of France under its military Emperor. The conscription was as indiscriminate as the plague, and less to be averted by any human means: it mattered not what might be the inclinations of the youth, nor what the wishes, principles, and feelings of the parents; he must take the chance of the lot, and as Buonaparte became more eager in his ambition and more prodigal in his expenditure of life, there was scarcely a chance of escaping from it. The chief object of education was to train up the boys in military habits and propensities; and the military was the only profession which offered any thing to their hopes. Commerce had been almost destroyed, less by the maritime war than by the tyranny of Buonaparte, who, in the vain desire of ruining Great Britain, cared not what injury he brought upon his own subjects and his dependent states. Few persons would engage in the study of the liberal professions, because it was not in their free choice to follow them. The official business of the state no longer offered, as in former times, a sure and honourable path to promotion and public esteem; it was reduced to the wretched art of doing whatever the Emperor required, supplying immediate wants by temporary shifts, enforcing oppressive edicts, defending acts of perfidy, inhumanity, and flagrant wrong, and promoting a system of despotism and delusion by all the aids of systematic falsehood. ?Degradation of the church.? And the Church was in a state of degradation as complete as that to which Julian would have reduced it; it had been stripped of its respectability as well as of its wealth. Buonaparte had hardly condescended to treat its re-establishment as any thing more than a mere matter of expediency: and when the Pope was brought to Paris for the purpose of crowning a man who had publicly professed himself an enemy to the Cross, the ceremonies of his reception were performed in a spirit of mockery which it was scarcely attempted to conceal. The Bishops of the new establishment, indeed, were not wanting in endeavours to deserve the Emperor’s favour; they uttered their maledictions against England, as Balaam would fain have done against the Israelites; and in strains of blasphemous adulation they addressed Buonaparte as one whom the Lord had brought out of the land of Egypt to be the man of his own right hand, the Cyrus whom God had chosen for the accomplishment of his inscrutable designs in regard to the nations of the earth, the Christ of providence, the lion of the tribe of Judah! But if this impious flattery gratified the tyrant to whom it was addressed, it contributed still farther to degrade the clerical character in public estimation. The constitutional clergy were regarded as little better than schismatics by those persons who retained a rooted attachment to the religion of their fathers: hence, in the interior, the churches were deserted by the devout as well as by the infidel; and they who were near enough the frontier went to partake of the ordinances and receive confirmation, from a foreign clergy, because they had no reverence for their own. Public opinion being so decidedly against the national priests, and their stipends precarious in all places, and at the best barely sufficient for a decent maintenance, it followed, as a natural consequence, that a supply of ministers for the service of the altar could not be found. Thus while the laws made every youth look to a military life as the probable allotment of destiny from which he could not escape, the circumstances of France were such as to take away all desire for any other profession.

At the head of a nation whose whole activity and talents were thus directed to war as the only pursuit, Buonaparte had realised those schemes of ambition which Louis XIV. had been prevented from accomplishing by Marlborough’s consummate abilities as a statesman and a general. He had effected all, and more than all that Louis had designed. The Austrian Netherlands, and all the German states as far as the Rhine, were annexed to France, and the European powers who were most injured and endangered by this usurpation acquiesced in it with hopeless submission. Beyond the Rhine the French were in possession of many strong places, which gave them access into the heart of Germany. Buonaparte was King of Italy, as well as Emperor of France. One of his brothers had been made King of Holland, a second King of Naples, and a third King of Westphalia, all in immediate dependence upon him as the head and founder of the Napoleonic dynasty. The Holy German Empire, ... the Empire, as by a prouder and exclusive title it claimed to be called, ... that venerable and mighty body of which the complicated confusion had hitherto, so it was boasted, been divinely preserved, was dissolved by the defection of its members, and the abdication of its chief. The secondary, and all the inferior powers of which it had been composed, had contracted under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, federatively and individually an alliance with the Emperor Napoleon, offensive and defensive, whereby they were virtually rendered so many feuds of France: the force which they were to bring into the field was determined; and to enable them to raise their respective contingents, the conscription was introduced into these states, as the accompanying curse of French alliance. This Confederacy was extended from Bavaria and the frontiers of Switzerland, to the banks of the Elbe. Switzerland acknowledged Buonaparte as its protector, and continued in peace, with something of the appearance, but little of the reality of independence, till it should suit his purpose to assume the sovereignty without disguise. Prussia, beaten, humbled and dismembered, seemed to exist only by his sufferance. Austria, after three struggles against revolutionary France, each more lamentably misconducted and more disastrous than the last, divorced from the empire, despoiled of the Netherlands, the Brisgaw, the Frickthal, the Vorarlberg, the Tyrol, and all its Italian territories, had no other consolation in the ignominious peace to which it had been forced than that of seeing the house of Brandenburg soon afterwards reduced to a state of greater humiliation. Denmark was in alliance with France, the government rather than the nation co-operating heartily with Buonaparte. Sweden, with an insane king, and a discontented people, maintained against him a war which was little more than nominal. Russia, the only country which seemed secure in its distance, its strength, and the unanimity of its inhabitants, ... the only continental state to which the rest of Europe might have looked as to a conservative power, ... Russia appeared to be dazzled by Buonaparte’s glory, duped by his insidious talents, and blindly subservient to his ambition. Spain was entirely subject to his control, its troops and its treasures were more at the disposal of the French government than of its own. Portugal had hitherto been suffered to remain neutral, because Buonaparte from time to time extorted large sums from the Court as the price of its neutrality, and because the produce of the Spanish mines found their way safely through the British cruisers, under the Portugueze flag. England alone perseveringly opposed the projects of this ambitious conqueror, and prevented the possibility of his accomplishing that scheme of universal dominion, which had it not been for her interference he believed to be within his reach.

The situation of England in the year 1807 was more extraordinary than any that is exhibited in the history of former times. After a war, which with the short interval of the peace of Amiens had continued fifteen years, and at the commencement of which all Europe had been leagued with her against revolutionary France, her last reliance upon the continental governments had failed; most of her former allies were leagued against her, and it was manifest that the few states which still preserved a semblance of neutrality, would soon in like manner be compelled into a confederacy with France. The French army and the English navy, two more tremendous powers than old times had ever seen, were opposed to each other without the possibility of coming in conflict. Masters as the French were on the continent, all thoughts of attacking them by land were at an end, and neither they nor their allies dared show their flag upon the sea. England could not in any way lessen the power of France, neither could France subdue, nor in any way weaken England. The threat of invasion had been laid aside: it had been seriously intended by Buonaparte, but the spirit with which the English people flew to arms intimidated him, and his gun-boats were left to rot in the harbours where with so much cost and care they had been collected. Secured against any such evil by our fleets, and still more by our internal strength, we were carrying on the war equally without fear and without hope.

The state of our home politics was not less remarkable. For the first time Great Britain was under an administration without a name; its ostensible head the Duke of Portland never appeared in parliament, and was neither spoken of, nor thought of by the public. He deserves, however, an honourable memorial in British history, for having accepted office in a time of peculiar and extreme difficulty, and thereby enabled the King to form a ministry whose opinions were in unison with his own principles and feelings, and with the wishes and true interests of his people. The other ministers held their places less by their own strength than by the weakness of their opponents, for of all administrations, that to which they had succeeded had been the most unpopular. From their want of influence in the country, the powerful families being mostly with the opposition, it was thought that they depended too much upon the personal favour of the sovereign, and were more literally the King’s servants than is consistent with the spirit of the constitution. Their talents had not been put fairly to the proof, and the nation had not as yet learned to appreciate the cool clear judgement of Lord Hawkesbury, the finished oratory of Mr. Canning, and the activity and intrepidity of Mr. Percival, always ready and always right-minded. While Pitt and Fox were living, every man believed either in one or in the other; one party was perfectly satisfied that all the measures of the minister were right, and the other as confidently expected that notwithstanding the evil consequences of his mispolicy and his misfortunes, the country was to be saved as soon as their political redeemer came into power. From this comfortable state, wherein faith supplied the place of reason, they were disturbed by the death of both these leaders, neither of whom left a successor, but both exaggerated reputations. It became the general complaint that there was no man or set of men in whom the nation had any confidence. Some persons apprehended from this a dangerous indifference in the public toward parliament itself. Others hoped that as the people were weary of factious debates, parliament would no longer be made a theatre of faction, but that measures would be discussed with a view to the common weal, and no longer solely with reference to the party by which they were brought forward.

The opposition consisted of the most heterogeneous and discordant materials. The Grenville party had a just view of the dangers of the country, and a right feeling for its honour. They were sincerely attached to the monarchy, to the Church of England, and to the existing constitution of the state: therefore they steadily and manfully resisted the measures of pretended reform which were brought forward sometimes by mistaken, sometimes by designing men, as leading with sure tendency to a mob-government, and all its certain horrors. They knew also that hopeless as the war might seem, it was our safest position, and that peace could not be made without disgrace and imminent danger, so long as the continent of Europe was under the control of France. But while they thus entirely agreed with the government in the fundamental principles of its policy foreign and domestic, they opposed it in all the details of administration with a factious animosity, which seemed to show how deeply they resented their dismissal from power: and thus they lost with the nation much of that weight which they must otherwise have possessed by reason of their acknowledged ability, their constitutional principles, and their high personal character. Still, however, they were regarded with a certain degree of respect, which was not the case with the remains of Mr. Fox’s party. ?The Foxites.? The Foxites, from the beginning of the war, through all its changes had uniformly taken part against their country; consistent in this and in nothing else, they had always sided with the enemy, pleading his cause, palliating his crimes, extolling his wisdom, magnifying his power, vilifying and accusing their own government, depreciating its resources, impeding its measures, insulting its allies, calling for disclosures which no government ought to make, and forcing them sometimes from the weakness and the mistaken liberality of their opponents. Buonaparte, as Washington had done before him, relied upon their zeal and virulence; and they by their speeches and writings served him more effectually upon the continent and in France itself, than all the manifestoes of his ministers, and the diatribes of his own press. In future ages it will be thought a strange and almost incredible anomaly in politics, that there should have existed in the legislature of any country a regular party, organised and acknowledged as such, whose business it was to obstruct the proceedings of government, and render it by every possible means contemptible and odious to the people; a party always in semi-alliance with the enemy, who in times of difficulty and danger prophesied nothing but failure, disgrace, and ruin; and whose systematic course of conduct, if it had been intended to bring about the fulfilment of their predictions, could not have been more exactly adapted to that object.

The Foxites, before they were admitted into office, had pertinaciously insisted upon the practicability and ease of making peace; this opinion could not be maintained while they were in power, and their dismission was at this time so recent, that it could not as yet decently be resumed. Attempts, however, to raise a popular cry for peace were made by certain manufacturers whose trade was at a stand: they were assisted by many of those persons who in strict adherence to the phraseology as well as the principles of the puritans, call themselves religious professors, and by some other conscientious but inconsistent men, who while they admit that the necessity of war must be allowed in just cases, exclaim in all cases against the practice, setting their compassionate feelings in array against reason, and against the manlier virtues. ?Superstition concerning Buonaparte.? A superstition concerning Buonaparte was mingled with this womanish sensibility. They who had not lost sight of his enormities doubted whether he were the Beast, whose number they contrived to discover in his name; ... or Antichrist himself. Others whom he had in some degree conciliated by his various aggressions upon the papal power, forgave him his crimes because the Whore of Babylon happened to be among those whom he had plundered: they rather imagined him to be the Man upon the White Horse. In this, however, they were all agreed, that Providence had appointed him for some great11 work: and it was an easy conclusion for those whose weak heads and warm imaginations looked no further, that it must be unavailing, if not impious, to oppose him.

This was a pitiable delusion: but more extraordinary was the weakness of those, who having been the friends of France at the commencement of the revolution, when they believed that the cause of liberty was implicated in her success, looked with complacency now upon the progress which oppression was making in the world, because France was the oppressor. They had turned their faces toward the east, in the morning, to worship the rising sun, and now when it was evening they were looking eastward still, obstinately affirming that still the sun was there. Time had passed on; circumstances were changed; nothing remained stationary except their understandings; and because they had been incapable of deriving wisdom from experience, they called themselves consistent; and because they were opposed in every thing to the views of their government, the hopes of their countrymen, and the honour and interest of their country, they arrogated to themselves the exclusive praise of patriotism! But the persons who from these various views and feelings united in calling for peace, were insignificant in number, and government had never at any time more certainly acted with the full concurrence of the nation, than in carrying on the war against Buonaparte.

Heavy burthens had been incurred during this long and arduous contest. At the commencement of the year 1807, the annual expenditure was not less than seventy-two millions, and the national debt amounted to six hundred and twenty-seven. But hitherto the prosperity of the country had kept pace with its exertions. The wheels of the machine seemed rather to move more freely than to be impeded by the weight which was laid upon them; and the war created means for supporting its enormous demands, by the enterprise which it called into action, and the money which it put in circulation. All the manufactures connected with the numerous branches of the naval and military service were in full activity. Agricultural industry also received an impulse such as had never before been experienced; for the English being excluded from the Baltic, and holding relations of doubtful amity with the United States of America, were fain to depend upon themselves for produce, and the emergency produced commensurate exertions throughout the kingdom. The country banks supplied a currency without which these exertions could not have been made; every where wastes were brought into cultivation; and the agricultural labourers being every where employed at high wages, contributed by their increased expenditure to extend the prosperity of which they partook.

Other circumstances, connected with the progress of society, and leading beyond all doubt to the most perilous crisis which society has ever yet undergone, conduced at this time mainly to the service of the state, and enabled the government to raise a revenue and support fleets and armies upon a scale which even in the last generation could not have been contemplated as possible. As the drunkard derives a pleasurable sensation, and an immediate excitement from strong liquors which by their sure effect are producing organic derangement, incurable disease, and death, so the manufacturing system contributed at this time to the national wealth and strength, while it was poisoning the vitals of the commonwealth. Carried as it now appeared to be by mechanical ingenuity and power to its utmost extent, it enabled our merchants to supply the world with manufactured goods, and at so low a price, that the most severe enactments, enforced by the most vigilant precautions, could not exclude them from the continental markets. In vain did Buonaparte shut the ports of Europe against the British flag, thinking that by destroying that part of our revenue which is derived from foreign trade, he should cut the sinews of our strength; in vain did the American government co-operate with him by its non-importation acts; British goods still found their way every where, and the books of the custom-house proved a continual increase in our exports; while the internal commerce of the country (nine-elevenths of the whole), and that with Ireland and our foreign possessions (a large proportion of the remaining parts), flourished beyond all former example. The manufacturing system supplied the war with men as well as means; the necessity for hands in agriculture also being greatly diminished by improved modes of labour, and by the use of agricultural machines, we were enabled without violence or difficulty to maintain in arms a force scarcely inferior in numbers to that of the enemy with all their fivefold superiority of population. And thus the country was prevented from feeling the evil of that forced population which the manufacturing system and the poor laws had produced, and of the prevailing custom of educating youths of the middle rank for stations higher than that in which they were born, or had means to support.

In resources therefore for maintaining war, the British government had never been so strong: and so far as Buonaparte reckoned upon our financial difficulties, and the want of men to resist him whenever and wherever he should bring his overwhelming force against us, he deceived himself, as much as when he supposed it possible to intimidate the British nation. But he reckoned also upon the weakness of our government, the aid which would be given him by a licentious press, and the progress of those insane opinions which lead to revolution and ruin. His councils were directed by a single will steadily to one end; and whatever he undertook was vigorously pursued, and with means proportioned to the object so as to render success certain, as far as depended upon well-concerted plans, adequate preparations, and military strength. But the constitution of a British cabinet, in which contrarious opinions are reconciled by concessions and compromises, seemed in time of war to insure vacillation and weakness. The whole conduct of the war had confirmed him in this judgement, which the history of all our wars since the days of Marlborough exemplifies. Every administration, this like the last, and the last like that before it, treading one after another in the same sheep-track of fatuity, proceeded without system, and with no other views than such as the chance and changes of the hour presented. Setting sail before the wind from whatever quarter it happened to blow, they steered a driftless course, though the shallows lay full before them. The same tardiness, the same indecision, the same half measures, the same waste of men and money in nugatory expeditions, had characterized them all. Moreover the government itself had been weakened by the concessions which faction, ever active and ever alert, had extorted from a series of feeble ministers during this long reign. At a time when discontent was at its height at the close of the American war, the House of Commons passed a resolution that the power of the Crown had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished; a resolution that carried with it its own refutation, being itself a decisive proof of the weakness of the government under which and against which it was passed. More than once had a ministry been forced upon the King in opposition to his own principles of policy, and his personal feelings. That which had happened might again happen; changes, always possible in a country which was governed so little by system, and so much by popular opinion, might again force the Whigs into power: ?Hopes of Buonaparte.? and under their ascendancy Buonaparte might reasonably expect to conclude a peace. With all the ports of the continent at his command he could build ships in any number, but it was only during peace that sailors could be trained to man them; a few years of peace would suffice for this, and then he might meet us on the seas with a superiority of force which would give him the power of landing an army at any time upon our shores. For this reason and for this alone, he was sincerely desirous of making peace with England, being the surest means by which he could hope to bring about the overthrow of this hated and otherwise invulnerable enemy. But while the war continued that enemy could do him no farther hurt, he was at leisure to continue his system of aggrandizement; wherever there was no sea to intervene, there was nothing to withstand him. His projects even in the fullest extent of their ambition were thought feasible by the public, who throughout Europe were dazzled by his success: his power appeared irresistible; and his empire was supposed by all persons to be firmly established, except by those who having a firm reliance upon the moral order of the world, believed that the triumph of evil principles could only endure for a time, and that no system can be permanent which is founded upon irreligion, injustice, and violence.