The fall of Napoleon completed the first drama of the historical series arising out of the French Revolution. Democratic ambition had found its natural and inevitable issue in warlike achievement; the passions of the camp had succeeded those of the forum, and the conquest of all the Continental monarchies had, for a time, apparently satiated the desires of an insatiable people. But the reaction was as violent as the action. In every warlike operation two parties are to be considered—the conquerors and the conquered. The rapacity, the insolence, the organised exactions of the French proved grievous in the extreme, and the hardship was felt as the more insupportable when the administrative powers of Napoleon gave to them the form of a regular tribute, and conducted the riches of conquered Europe, in a perennial stream, to the imperial treasury. A unanimous cry of indignation arose from every part of the Continent; a crusade commenced, in all quarters, from the experienced suffering of mankind; from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, the liberating warriors came forth, and the strength of an injured world collected by a convulsive effort at the heart, to throw off the load which had oppressed it. Securely cradled amidst the waves, England, like her immortal chief at Waterloo, had calmly awaited the hour when she might be called on to take the lead in the terrible strife. Her energy, when it arrived, rivalled her former patience in privation, her fortitude in suffering; and the one only, nation which, throughout the struggle, had been unconquered, at length stood foremost in the fight, and struck the final and decisive blow for the deliverance of the world.

But the victory of nations did not terminate the war of opinion; the triumph of armies did not end the collision of thought. France was conquered, but the principles of her Revolution were not extirpated; they had covered her own soil with mourning, but they were too flattering to the pride of the human heart to be subdued but by many ages of suffering. The lesson taught by the subjugation of her power, the double capture of her capital, was too serious to be soon forgotten by her rulers; but the agony which had been previously felt by the people, had ended with a generation which was now mouldering in its grave. It is by, the last impressions that the durable opinions of mankind are formed; and effects had here succeeded each other so rapidly, that the earlier ones were in a great measure forgotten. The conscription had caused the guillotine to be forgotten; grief for the loss of the frontier of the Rhine had obliterated that of the dissolution of the National Assembly. Men did not know that the first was the natural result of the last. There was little danger of France soon crossing the Rhine, but much of her reviving the opinions of Mirabeau and SiÉyÈs. The first drama, where the military bore the prominent part, was ended; but the second, in which civil patriots were to be the leading characters, and vehement political passions excited, was still to commence; the Lager had terminated, but the Piccolomini was only beginning, and Wallenstein's Death had not yet commenced.

Everything conspired to render the era subsequent to the fall of Napoleon as memorable for civil changes as that era itself had been for military triumphs. Catherine of Russia had said at the commencement of the Revolution, that the only way to prevent its principles spreading, and save Europe from civil convulsion, was to engage in war, and cause the national to supersede the social passions. The experiment, after a fearful struggle, succeeded; but it succeeded only for a time. War wore itself out; a contest of twenty years' duration at once drained away the blood and exhausted the treasures of Europe. The excitement, the animation, the mingled horrors and glories of military strife, were followed by a long period of repose, during which the social passions were daily gaining strength from the very magnitude of the contest which had preceded it. The desire for excitement continued, and the means of gratifying it had ceased: the cannon of Leipsic and Waterloo still resounded through the world, but no new combats furnished daily materials for anxiety, terror, or exultation. The nations were chained to peace by the immensity of the sacrifices made in the preceding war: all governments had suffered so much during its continuance, that, like wounded veterans, they dreaded a renewal of the fight. During the many years of constrained repose which succeeded the battle of Waterloo, the vehement excitement occasioned by the Revolutionary wars continued; but, from default of external, it turned to internal objects. Democratic came instead of military ambition; the social succeeded the national passions; the spirit was the same, but its field was changed. Meanwhile the blessed effect of long continued peace, by allowing industry in every quarter to reap its fruits in quiet, was daily adding to the strength and energy, because augmenting the resources, of the middle class, in whom these feelings are ever the strongest, because they are the first to be promoted by a change; while, in a similar proportion, the power of government was daily declining, from the necessity of providing for the interest of the debts contracted during the preceding strife, and reducing the military forces which had so long averted its dangers or achieved its triumphs.

The change in the ruling passions of mankind has clearly appeared in the annals of nations, in the thirty years which followed the fall of Napoleon. Governments have often great difficulties to contend with, but it has been not with each other, but with their subjects; many of them have been overturned, not by foreign armies, but by their own. Europe has been often on the verge of a general war, but the danger of it arose not, as in former days, from the throne, but the cottage; the persons who urged it on were not kings or their ministers, but the tribunes of the people. The chief efforts of governments in every country have been directed to the preservation of that peace which the collisions of so many interests, and the vehemence of such passions, endangered: war was repeatedly threatened, but it was so, not by sovereigns, but by the people. The sovereigns were successful; but their being so only augmented the dangers of their position, and increased the peril arising from the ardour of the social passions with which they had to contend; for every year of peace added to the strength of their opponents as much as it diminished their own.

The preservation of peace, unbroken from 1815 to 1830, was fraught with immense blessings to Europe; and, had it been properly improved, might have been so to the cause of freedom throughout the world; but it proved fatal to the dynasty of the Restoration. From necessity, as well as inclination, from the recollection of the double capture of Paris, as well as conscious inability to conduct warlike operations, Louis XVIII. remained at peace; and no monarch who does so seems likely to remain long on the French throne. Death, and extreme prudence of conduct, alone saved him from dethronement. The whole history of the Restoration, from 1815 to 1830, was that of one vast and ceaseless conspiracy against the Bourbons, existing rather in the hearts and minds than the measures and designs of men. No concessions to freedom, no moderation of government, no diminution of public burdens, could reconcile the people to a dynasty imposed on them by the stranger. One part of the people were dreaming of the past, another speculating on the future; all were dissatisfied with the present. The wars, the glories of the Empire, rose up in painful contrast to the peace and monotony of the present. Successive contractions of the elective constituency, and restrictions on the press, had no effect in diminishing the danger it excited in the minds of men, and only became, like all other concealed passions, more powerful from the difficulty of giving it expression. France was daily increasing in wealth, freedom, and material well-being, but it was as steadily declining in contentment, loyalty, and happiness—a strange combination, but such as is by no means unknown in private life, when all external appliances are favourable, but the heart is gnawed by a secret and ungratified passion. At length the general discontent rose to such a pitch that it became impossible to carry on the government; a coup d'État was attempted, to restore some degree of efficiency to the executive, but it was attempted by the "feeble arms of confessors and kings;" the army wavered in its duty; the Orleans family took advantage of the tumult, and the dynasty of the elder branch of the Bourbons was overthrown.

That so great an event as the overthrow of a dynasty by a sudden urban insurrection, should have produced a great impression all over the world, was to have been expected; but it could hardly have been anticipated it would have been attended by the effects with which it actually was in Great Britain. But many causes had conspired at that period to prepare the public mind in England for changes; and, what is very remarkable, these causes had arisen mainly from the magnitude of the successes with which the war had been attended. The capital which had been realised during the war had been so great, the influence of the moneyed interest had become so powerful, that the legislature became affected by their desires. The Monetary Bill of 1819, before many years had elapsed, had added 50 per cent to the value of money, and the weight of debts and taxes, and taken as much from the remuneration of industry. Hence a total change in the feelings, influences, and political relations of society. The territorial aristocracy was weakened as much as the commercial was aggrandised; small landed proprietors were everywhere ruined from the fall of prices; the magnates stood forth in increased lustre from the enhanced value of their revenues. Industry was querulous from long-continued suffering; wealth, ambitious from sudden exaltation. Political power was coveted by one class, from the excess of their riches; by another, from the depth of their misery. The emancipation of the Roman Catholics severed the last bond, that of a common religion, which had hitherto held together the different classes, and imprinted on the minds of a large and sincere class a thirst for vengeance, which overwhelmed every consideration of reason. The result of these concurring causes was that the institutions of England were essentially altered by the earthquake of 1830, and a new class elevated to supreme power by means, bloodless indeed, but scarcely less violent than the revolution which had overturned Charles X.

The revolution of 1830 elevated the middle class to the direction of affairs in France, and the Reform Bill vested the same class in effect with supreme power in the British empire. Vast effects followed this all-important change in both countries. For the first time in the history of mankind the experiment was made of vesting the electoral franchise, not in a varied and limited class, as in Old England, or in the whole citizens, as in revolutionary France or America, but in persons possessed only of a certain money qualification. The franchise was not materially changed in France, but the general arming of the National Guard, and the revolutionary origin of the new government, effectually secured attention to the wishes of the burgher aristocracy; in England they were at once vested with the command of the state, for the House of Commons was returned by a million of electors, who voted for 658 members, of whom two-thirds were the representatives of boroughs, and two-thirds of their constituents shopkeepers, or persons whom they influenced. Thence consequences of incalculable importance in both countries, and effects which have left indelible traces in the future history of mankind.

The first effect of this identity of feeling and interest, in the class thus for the first time intrusted with the practical direction of affairs in both countries, was a close political alliance between their governments, and an entire change in the Foreign policy of Great Britain. To the vehement hostility and ceaseless rivalry of four centuries succeeded an alliance sincere and cordial at the time; though, like other intimacies founded on identity of passion, not of interest, it might be doubted whether it would survive the emotions which gave it birth. In the mean time, however, the effects of this alliance were novel, and in the highest degree important. When the lords of the earth and the sea united, no power in Europe ventured to confront them; the peace of Europe was preserved by their union. The Czar in full march towards Paris was arrested on the Vistula; he found ample employment for his arms in resisting the efforts of the Poles to restore their much-loved nationality. Austria and Prussia were too much occupied with the surveillance of the discontented in their own dominions to think of renewing the crusade of 1813; nor did they venture to do so when the forces of England were united to those of France. The consequence was that the march of revolution was unresisted in Western Europe, and an entire change effected in the institutions and dynasties on the throne in its principal continental states. The Orleans family continued firmly, and to all appearance permanently, seated on the throne of France; Belgium was revolutionised, torn from the monarchy of the Netherlands, and the Cobourg family seated on its throne: the monarchies of Spain and Portugal were overturned, and a revolutionary dynasty of queens placed on the thrones of these countries, in direct violation of the Treaty of Utrecht; while in the east of Europe the last remnants of Polish nationality were extinguished on the banks of the Vistula. Durable interests were overlooked, ancient alliances broken, long-established rivalries forgotten in the fleeting passions of the moment. Confederacies the most opposite to the lasting policy of the very nations who contracted them, were not only formed, but acted upon. Europe beheld with astonishment the arms of Prussia united with those of Russia to destroy the barrier of the Continent against the Muscovite power on the Sarmatian plains; the Leopards of England joined to the tricolor standard to wrest Antwerp from Holland, and secure the throne of the Netherlands to a son-in-law of France; and the scarlet uniforms blended with the ensigns of revolution to beat down the liberties of the Basque provinces, and prepare the heiress of Spain for the arms of a son of France, on the very theatre of Wellington's triumphs.

Novel and extraordinary as were these results of the revolution of 1830 upon the political relations of Europe, its effects upon the colonial empire of England, and, through it, upon the future destinies of the human species, were still greater and more important. To the end of the world, the consequences of the change in the policy of England will be felt in every quarter of the globe. Its first effect was to bring about the emancipation of the negroes in the West Indies. Eight hundred thousand slaves in the British colonies in that quarter of the globe received the perilous gift of unconditional freedom. For the first time in the history of mankind the experiment was made of extending the institutions of Japhet to the sons of Ham. As a natural result of so vast and sudden a change, and of the conferring of the institutions of the Anglo-Saxons upon unlettered savages, the proprietors of those noble colonies were ruined, their affections alienated, and the authority of the mother country preserved only by the terror of arms. Canada shared in the moral earthquake which shook the globe, and that noble offshoot of the empire was only preserved to Great Britain by the courage of its soldiers and the loyalty of its English and Highland citizens. Australia rapidly advanced in wealth, industry, and population during these eventful years. Every commercial crisis which paralysed industry, every social struggle which excited hope, every successful innovation which diminished security, added to the stream of hardy and enterprising emigrants who crowded to its shores; New Zealand was added to the already colossal empire of England in Oceania; and it is apparent that the foundations have been laid in a fifth hemisphere of another nation, destined to rival, perhaps eclipse, Europe itself in the career of human improvement. For the first time in the history of mankind the course of advancement ceased to be from East to West; but it was not destined to be arrested by the Rocky Mountains; the mighty day of four thousand years was drawing to its close; but before its light was extinguished in the West, civilisation had returned to the land of its birth; and ere its orb had set in the waves of the Pacific, the sun of knowledge was illuminating the isles of the Eastern Sea.

Great and important as have been these results of the social convulsions of France and England in the first instance, they sink into insignificance compared to those which have followed the change in the commercial policy and increased stringency of the monetary laws of Great Britain. The effect of these all-important measures, from which so much was expected, and so little, save suffering, has been received, has been to augment to an extraordinary and unparalleled degree the outward tendency of the British people. The agricultural population, especially in Ireland, has been violently torn up from the land of its birth by woeful suffering; a famine of the thirteenth appeared amidst the population of the nineteenth century; and to this terrible but transient source of suffering has been superadded the lasting discouragement arising from the virtual closing of the market of England to Irish produce, by the inundations of grain from foreign states. Since the barriers raised by human regulations have been thrown down, the eternal laws of nature have appeared in full operation; the old and rich state can always undersell the young and poor one in manufactures, and is always under-sold by it in agricultural produce. The fate of old Rome apparently is reserved for Great Britain; the harvests of Poland, the Ukraine, and America, prostrate agriculture in the British Isles as effectually as those of Sicily, Libya, and Egypt did the old Patrimony of the Legions; and after the lapse of eighteen hundred years the same effects appear. The great cities flourish, but the country decays; the exportation of human beings and the importation of human food keep up a gainful traffic in the seaport towns; but it is every day more and more gliding into the hands of the foreigner; and while exports and imports are constantly increasing, the mainstay of national strength, the cultivation of the soil, is rapidly declining. The effects upon the strength, resources, and population of the empire, and the growth of its colonial possessions, have been equally important. Europe, before the middle of the century, beholds with astonishment Great Britain, which, at the end of the war, had been self-supporting, importing ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of the national subsistence, and a constant stream of three hundred thousand emigrants annually leaving its shores. Its inhabitants, which for four centuries had been constantly increasing, have declined a million in the last five years in the two islands, and two millions in Ireland, taken separately; but the foundations of a vast empire have been laid in the Transatlantic and Australian wilds; and the annual addition of three hundred thousand souls to the European population of the New World by immigration alone, has come almost to double the already marvellous rapidity of American increase.

While this vast transference of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic population to the embryo states of America and Australia has been going forward, the United States of America are rapidly increasing in numbers and extent of territory. The usual and fearful ambition of republican states has appeared there in more than its usual proportions. During the ten years from 1840 to 1850, the inhabitants of the United States have increased six millions: they have grown from eighteen to twenty-four millions. But the increase of its territory has been still more extraordinary: it has been extended, during the same period, from somewhat above two millions, to three million three hundred thousand square miles. A territory nine times the size of Old France has been added to the devouring Republic in ten years. The conquests of Rome in ancient, of the English in India in modern times, afford no parallel instance of rapid and unbroken increase. Everything indicates that a vast migration of the human species is going forward, and the family of Japhet in the course of being transferred from its native to its destined seats. To this prodigious movement it is hard to say whether the disappointed energies of democratic vigour in Europe, or the insatiable spirit of republican ambition in America, has most contributed; for the first overcame all the attachments of home, and all the endearments of kindred in a large—and that the most energetic—portion of the people in the old world; while the latter has prepared for their reception ample seats—in which a kindred tongue and institutions prevail—in the new.

While this vast and unexampled exodus of the Anglo-Saxon race, across a wider ocean than the Red Sea, and to a greater promised land than that of Canaan, has been going forward, a corresponding, and in some respects still more marvellous, increase of the Sclavonic race in the Muscovite dominions has taken place. The immense dominions and formidable power of the Czar, which had received so vast an addition from the successful termination of the contest with Napoleon, were scarcely less increased by the events of the long peace which followed. The inhuman cruelty with which the Turks prosecuted the war with the Greeks, awakened all the sympathies of the Christian world; governments were impelled by their subjects into a crusade against the Crescent; and the battle of Navarino, which, for the first time in history, beheld the flags of England, France, and Russia side by side, at once ruined the Ottoman navy, and reft the most important provinces of Greece from Turkey. The inconceivable infatuation of the Turks, and their characteristic ignorance of the strength of the enemy whom they provoked, impelled them soon after into a war with Russia; and then the immeasurable superiority which the Cross had now acquired over the Crescent at once appeared. Varna, the scene of the bloody defeat of the French chivalry by the Janizaries of Bajazet, yielded to the scientific approaches of the Russians; the barrier, hitherto insurmountable, of the Balkan, was passed by Diebitch; Adrianople fell; and the anxious intervention of the other European powers alone prevented the entire subjugation of Turkey, and the entry of the Muscovite battalions through the breach made by the cannon of Mahomet in the walls of Constantinople.

Great as were these results to the growth of Russia, of the forced and long-continued pacification of Western Europe, still more important were those which followed its intestine convulsions. Every throe of the revolutionary earthquake in France has tended to its ultimate advantage, and been attended by a great accession of territory or augmentation of influence. The Revolution of 1789 in its ultimate effects brought the Cossacks to Paris; that of 1830 extinguished the last remains of Polish nationality, and established the Muscovites in a lasting sway on the banks of the Vistula. The revolt of Ibrahim Pacha, and the victory of Koniah, which reduced the Ottoman empire to the verge of destruction, brought the Russian battalions to Scutari, and averted subjugation from a rebellious vassal, only by surrendering the keys of the Dardanelles to the Czar, and converting the Black Sea into a Russian lake. Greater still have been the results of the French Revolution of 1848 to the moral influence, and through it the real power, of Russia. Germany, torn by revolutionary passions, was soon brought into the most deplorable state of anarchy; Austria, distracted at once by a Bohemian, Italian, and Hungarian revolt, was within a hair-breadth of destruction; and the presence of 150,000 Russians on the Hungarian plains alone determined the Magyar contest in favour of Austria. Immense is the addition which this decisive move has made to the influence of Russia; no charge of the Old Guard of Napoleon at the close of the day was ever more triumphant. Russia now boasts of 66,000,000 of men within her dominions; her territories embrace a seventh of the habitable globe; and her influence is paramount from the wall of China to the banks of the Rhine.

Great as the acquisitions of the Muscovite power have been during the last thirty years, they have almost been rivalled by those of the British in India. They have fairly outstripped everything in this age of wonders; a parallel will in vain be sought for them in the whole annals of the world. They do not resemble the conquests of the Romans in ancient, or of the Russians in modern times; they have not been the result of the lust of conquest, steadily and perseveringly applied to general subjugation, or the passions of democracy finding their natural vent in foreign conquest. As little were they the offspring of a vehement and turbulent spirit, similar to that which carried the French eagles to Vienna and the Kremlin. The disposition of the Anglo-Saxons, practically gain-seeking, and shunning wars as an interruption of their profits, has been a perpetual check to any such disposition—their immense distance from the scene of action on the plains of Hindostan, an effectual bar to its indulgence. India has not been governed by a race of warlike sovereigns, eager for conquest, covetous of glory; but by a company of pacific merchants, intent only on the augmentation of their profits and the diminution of their expenses. Their great cause of complaint against the Governors-General to whom have been successively intrusted the government of their vast dominions, was, that they were too prone to defensive preparations; that they did not sufficiently study the increase of these profits or the saving of these expenses. War was constantly forced upon them as a measure of necessity; repeated coalitions of the native sovereigns compelled them to draw the sword to prevent their expulsion from the peninsula. Conquest has been the condition of existence.

Yet such is the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon race, and the energy with which the successive contests were maintained by the diminutive force at the disposal of the company, that marvellous beyond all example have been the victories which they gained and the conquests which they achieved. The long period of European peace which followed the battle of Waterloo, was anything but one of repose in India. It beheld successively the final war with, and subjugation of, the Mahrattas by the genius of Lord Hastings, the overthrow of the Pindaree horsemen, the difficult subjugation of the Goorkha mountaineers; the storming of Bhurtpore, the taming of "the giant strength of Ava;" the conquest of Cabul, and fearful horrors of the Coord Cabul retreat; the subsequent gallant recovery of its capital; the conquest of Scinde, and reduction of Gwalior; the wars with the Sikhs, the desperate passages of arms at Ferozeshah and Chilianwalah, and the final triumphs of Sobraon and Goojerat. Nor was it in the peninsula of Hindostan alone that the strength of the British, when at length fairly aroused, was exerted; the vast empire of China was wrestled with at the very moment when their strength in the East was engaged in the Affghanistan expedition; and the world, which was anxiously expecting the fall of the much-envied British empire in India, beheld with astonishment, in the same Delhi Gazette, the announcement of the second capture of Cabul in the heart of Asia, and the dictating of a glorious peace to the Chinese under the walls of Nankin.

While successes so great and bewildering were attending the arms of civilisation on the remote parts of the earth, a great and most disastrous convulsion was preparing in its heart. Paris, as in every age, was the centre of impulsion to the whole civilised world. Louis Philippe had a very difficult game to play, and he long played it with success; but no human ability could, with the disposition of the people, permanently maintain the government of the country. He aimed at being the Napoleon of Peace; and his great predecessor knew better than any one, and has said oftener, that he himself would have failed in the attempt. Louis Philippe owed his elevation to revolution; and he had the difficult, if not impossible, task to perform, without foreign war, of coercing its passions. Hardly was he seated on the throne, when he felt the necessity in deeds, if not in words, of disclaiming his origin. His whole reign was a continued painful and perilous conflict with the power which had created him, and at length he sank in this struggle. He had not the means of maintaining the conflict. A successful usurper, he could not appeal to traditionary influences; a revolutionary monarch, he was compelled to coerce the passions of revolution; a military chief, he was obliged to restrain the passions of the soldiers. They demanded war, and he was constrained to keep them at peace; they sighed for plunder, and he could only meet them with economy; they panted for glory, and his policy retained them in obscurity.

Political influence—in other words, corruption—was the only means left of carrying on the government, and that state engine was worked with great industry, and for a time with great success. But although gratification to the selfish passions must always, in the long run, be the main foundation of government, men are not entirely and for ever governed by their influence. "C'est l'imagination," said Napoleon, "qui domine le monde." All nations, and most of all the French, occasionally require aliment to the passions; and no dynasty will long maintain its sway over them which does not frequently gratify their ruling dispositions. Napoleon was so popular because he at once consulted their interests and gratified their passions; Louis Philippe the reverse, because he attended only to their interests. Great as was his influence, unbounded his patronage, immense his revenue, it yet fell short of the wants of his needy supporters: he experienced erelong the truth of the well-known saying, that every office given away made one ungrateful and three discontented. The immediate cause of his fall in February 1848 was the pusillanimity of his family, who declined to head his troops, and the weakness of his counsellors, who urged submission in presence of danger; but its remote causes were of much older date and wider extent. Government, to be lasting, must be founded either on traditionary influence, the gratification of new interests and passions, or the force of arms; and that one which has not the first will do well to rest as soon as possible on the two last.

Disastrous beyond all precedent, or what even could have been conceived, have been the effects of this new revolution in Paris on the whole Continent; and a very long period must elapse before they are obviated. The spectacle of a government, esteemed one of the strongest in Europe, and a dynasty which promised to be of lasting duration, overturned almost without resistance by an urban tumult, roused the revolutionary party everywhere to a perfect pitch of frenzy. A universal liberation from government, and restraint of any kind, was expected, and for a time attained, by the people in the principal Continental states, when a republic was again proclaimed in France; and the people, strong in their newly-acquired rights of universal suffrage, were seen electing a National Assembly, to whom the destinies of the country were to be intrusted. The effect was instantaneous and universal; the shock of the moral earthquake was felt in every part of Europe. Italy was immediately in a blaze; Piedmont joined the revolutionary crusade; and the Austrian forces, expelled from Milan, were glad to seek an asylum behind the Mincio. Venice threw off the German yoke, and proclaimed again the independence of St Mark; the Pope was driven from Rome, the Bourbons in Naples were saved only by the fidelity of their Swiss guards from destruction; Sicily was severed from their dominion, and all Italy, from the extremity of Calabria to the foot of the Alps, was arraying its forces against constituted authority, and in opposition to the sway of the Tramontane governments. The ardent and enthusiastic were everywhere in transports, and prophesied the resurrection of a great and united Roman republic from the courage of modern patriotism; the learned and experienced anticipated nothing but ruin to the cause of freedom from the transports of a people incapable of exercising its power, and unable to defend its rights.

Still more serious and formidable were the convulsions in Germany; for these were more inspired with the Teutonic love of freedom, and wielded the arm which so long had been victorious in the fields of European fame. So violent were the shocks of the revolutionary earthquake in the Fatherland, that the entire disruption of society and ruin of the national independence seemed to be threatened by its effects. Government was overturned after a violent contest in Berlin. It fell almost without a struggle, from the pusillanimity of the Emperor, in Vienna. The Prussians, especially in the great towns, entered, with the characteristic ardour of their disposition, into the career of revolution; universal suffrage was everywhere proclaimed—national guards established. The lesser states on the Rhine all followed the example of Prussia; and an assembly of delegates, from every part of the Fatherland, at Frankfort, seemed to realise for a brief period the dream of German unity and independence. But while the enthusiasts on the Rhine were speculating on the independence of their country, the enthusiasts in Vienna and Hungary were taking the most effectual steps to destroy it. A frightful civil war ensued in all the Austrian provinces, and soon acquired such strength as threatened to tear in pieces the whole of its vast dominions. No sooner was the central authority in Vienna overturned, than rebellion broke out in all the provinces. The Sclavonians revolted in Bohemia, the Lombards in Italy, the Magyars in Hungary; the close vicinity of a powerful Russian force alone restrained the Poles in Gallicia. Worse, even, because more widely felt than the passions of democracy, the animosities of Race burst forth with fearful violence in eastern Europe. The standard of Georgey in Hungary—whom the Austrians, distracted by civil war in all their provinces, were unable to subdue—soon attracted a large part of the indignant Poles, and nearly the whole of the warlike Magyars, to the field of battle on the banks of the Danube. Not a hope seemed to remain for the great and distracted Austrian empire. Chaos had returned; society seemed resolved into its original elements; and the chief bulwark of Europe against Moscovite domination seemed on the point of being broken up into several separate states, actuated by the most violent hatred at each other, and alike incapable, singly or together, of making head against the vast and centralised power of Russia.

The first successful stand against the deluge of revolution was made in Great Britain; and there it was withstood, not by the bayonets of the soldiers, but by the batons of the citizens. The 10th April was the Waterloo of chartist rebellion in England; a memorable proof that the institutions and traditionary influences of a free people, suited to their wants, and in harmony with their dispositions, can, in such felicitous circumstances, oppose a more successful barrier to social dangers than the most powerful military force at the command of a despotic chief. Rebellion, as usual when England is in distress, broke out in Ireland; but it terminated in ridicule, and revealed at once the ingratitude and impotence of the Celtic race in the Emerald isle. But a far more serious and bloody conflict awaited the cause of order in the streets of Paris; and society there narrowly escaped the restoration of the reign of terror and the government of Robespierre. As usual in civil convulsions, the leaders of the first successful revolt soon became insupportable to their infuriated followers; a second 10th August followed, and that much more quickly than on the first occasion—a second dethronement of the Bourbons; but it was met by very different opponents. Cavaignac and the army were not so easily beat down as Louis, deserted by all the world but his faithful Swiss Guards. The contest was long, and bloody, and, for a time, it seemed more than doubtful to which side victory would incline; but at length the cause of order prevailed. The authority of the Assembly, however, was not established till above a hundred barricades had been carried at the point of the bayonet, several thousands of the insurgents slain, and eleven thousand sentenced to transportation by the courts-martial of the victorious soldiers.

Less violent in the outset, but more disastrous far in the end, were the means by which Austria was brought through the throes of her revolutionary convulsion. It was the army, and the army alone, which in the last extremity saved the state; but, unhappily, it was not the national army alone which achieved the deliverance. So violent were the passions by which the country was torn, so great the power of the rival races and nations which contended for its mastery, that the unaided strength of the monarchy was unequal to the task of subduing them. In Prague, indeed, the firmness of Windischgratz extinguished the revolt—in Italy the consummate talents of Radetsky restored victory to the imperial standards, and drove the Piedmontese to a disgraceful peace; and in the heart of the monarchy, Vienna, after a fierce struggle, was regained by the united arms of the Bohemian and Croatian. But in Hungary the Magyars were not so easily overcome. Such was the valour of that warlike race, and such the military talents of their chiefs, that, although not numbering more than a third of the population of Hungary, and an eighth of that of the whole monarchy, it was found impracticable to subdue them without external aid. The Russians, as a matter of necessity, were called in to prevent the second capture of Vienna; a hundred and fifty thousand Moscovites ere long appeared on the Hungarian plains—numbers triumphed over valour—and Austria was saved by the sacrifice of its independence. Incalculable have been the consequences of this great and decisive movement on the part of the Czar. Not less than the capture of Paris, it has fascinated and subdued the minds of men. It has rendered him the undisputed master of the east of Europe, and led to a secret alliance, offensive and defensive, which at the convenient season will open to the Russians the road to Constantinople.

At length the moment of reaction arrived in France itself, and the country, whose vehement convulsions had overturned the institutions of so many other states, was itself doomed to undergo the stern but just law of retribution. The undisguised designs of the Socialists against property of every kind, the frequent revolts, the notorious imbecility and trifling of the National Assembly, had so discredited republican institutions, that the nation was fully prepared for a change of any kind from democratic to monarchical institutions. Louis Napoleon had the advantage of a great name, and of historical associations, which raised him by a large majority to the presidency, and of able counsellors who steered him through its difficulties; but the decisive success of the coup d'etat of December 2nd was mainly owing to the universal contempt into which the republican rulers had fallen, and the general terror which the designs of the Socialists had excited. The nation would, perhaps, not so willingly have ranged itself under the banners of any merely military chief who promised to shelter them from the evident dangers with which society was menaced; and the vigour and fidelity of the army ensured its success. The restoration of military despotism in France in 1851, after the brief and fearful reign of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in that everchanging country, adds another to the numerous proofs which history affords, that successful revolution, by whomsoever effected, and under all imaginable diversity of nations, race, and circumstances, can end only in the empire of the sword.

But although the dangers of revolutionary convulsion have been adjourned, at least, if not entirely removed, by the general triumph of military power on the Continent, and its entire re-establishment in France, other dangers, of an equally formidable, and perhaps still more pressing, kind, have arisen from its very success. Since the battle of Waterloo all the contests in Europe have been internal only. There have been many desperate and bloody struggles, but they have not been those of nation against nation, but of class with class, or race with race. No foreign wars have desolated Europe; and the whole efforts of government in every country have been directed to moderating the warlike propensities of their subjects, and preventing the fierce animosities of nationality and race from involving the world in general conflagration. So decisively was this the characteristic of the period, and so great was the difficulty in moderating the warlike dispositions of their subjects, that it seemed that the sentiment of the poet should be reversed, and it might with truth be said—

But this has been materially changed by the consequences of the great European revolution of 1848; and it may now be doubted whether the greatest dangers which threaten society are not those of foreign subjugation and the loss of national independence. By the natural effects of the general convulsions of 1848, the armies of the Continental states have been prodigiously augmented; and such are the dangers of their respective positions, from the turbulent disposition of their own subjects, that they cannot be materially reduced. In France there are 385,000 men in arms; in Austria as many; in Prussia, 200,000; in Russia, 600,000. Fifteen hundred thousand regular soldiers are arrayed on the Continent ready for mutual slaughter, and awaiting only a signal from their respective cabinets to direct their united hostility against any country which may have provoked their resentment. Such have been the results of the French Revolution of 1848, and the rise of "liberty, equality, and fraternity" in the centre of European civilisation.

Disastrous beyond all precedent have been the effects of this revolutionary convulsion, from which so much was expected by the ardent and enthusiastic in every country, upon the cause of freedom throughout the world. Not only has the reign of representative institutions, and the sway of constitutional ideas, been arrested on the Continent, but the absolute government of the sword has been established in its principal monarchies. Austria has openly repudiated all the liberal institutions forced upon her during the first throes of the convulsion, and avowedly based the government upon the army, and the army alone. Prussia is more covertly, but not less assiduously, following out the same system; and in France, the real council of state, servile senate, and mock assembly of deputies of Napoleon, have been re-established, the national guard generally dissolved, and the centralised despotism of Louis Napoleon promises to rival in efficiency and general support the centralised despotism of Augustus in ancient days. Parties have become so exasperated at each other, that no accommodation or compromise is longer possible; injuries that never can be forgiven have been mutually inflicted; the despotism of the PrÆtorians, and a Jacquerie of the Red Republicans, are the only alternatives left to Europe; and the fair form of real freedom, which grows and flourishes in peace, but melts away before the first breath of war, has disappeared from the earth. Such is the invariable and inevitable result of unchaining the passions of the people, and of a successful revolt on their part against the government of knowledge and property.

Still more pressing, and to ourselves formidable, are the dangers which now threaten this country, from the consequences of that revolt against established institutions, from which the reign of universal peace was anticipated four years ago. Our position has been rendered insecure by the very effects of our former triumphs; we are threatened with perils, not so much from our enemies, as from ourselves; it is our weakness which is their strength; and we owe our present critical position infinitely more to our own blindness than to their foresight. Insensibility to future and contingent dangers has in every age been the characteristic of the English people, and is the real cause why the long wars, in which we have been engaged for the last century and a half, have been deeply chequered in the outset with disaster; and to this is to be ascribed three-fourths of the debt which now oppresses the energies and cramps the exertions of our people. But several causes, springing from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, have rendered these influences in an especial manner powerful during the last thirty years; and it is the consequence of their united influence which now renders the condition of this country so precarious.

The contractions of the currency introduced in 1819, and rendered still more stringent by the acts of 1844 and 1845, have changed the value of money fifty per cent; coupled with Free Trade in all the branches of industry, it has doubled it. In other words, it has doubled the weight of taxes, debts, and encumbrances of every description, and at the same time halved the resources of those who are to pay them. Fifty millions a-year raised for the public revenue, are as great a burden now as a hundred millions a-year were during the war; the nation, at the close of thirty-five years of unbroken peace, is in reality more heavily taxed than it was at the end of twenty years of uninterrupted hostility. The necessary consequence of this has been, that it has become impossible to maintain the national armaments on a scale at all proportionate to the national extension and necessities; and it has been exposed, on the first rupture, to the most serious dangers from the attacks of artless and contemptible enemies. Our Indian empire, numbering a hundred millions of men among its subjects, was brought to the verge of ruin by the assault of the Sikhs, who had only six millions to feed their armies; and the military strength of Great Britain is now strained to the uttermost to withstand the hostility at the Cape of Good Hope of the Caffres, who never have brought six thousand men together into the field. In proportion to the extension of our colonial empire and the necessity of increased forces to defend it, our armaments have been reduced both by sea and land. Every gleam of colonial peace has been invariably followed by profuse demands at home for a reduction of the establishments and a diminution of the national expenses; until they have been reduced to so low a point that the nation, which, during the war, had a million of men in arms, two hundred and forty ships of the line bearing the royal flag, and a hundred in commission, could not now muster thirty thousand men and ten ships of the line to guard Great Britain from invasion, London from capture, and the British Empire from destruction.

Still more serious, because more irremediable, in its origin, and disastrous in its effects, has been the change which has come over the public mind in a powerful and influential part of the nation. This has mainly arisen from the very magnitude of our former triumphs, and the long-continued peace to which it has given rise. The nation had gained such extraordinary successes during the war, and vanquished so formidable an opponent, that it had come to regard itself, not without a show of reason, as invincible; hostilities have been so long intermitted that the younger and more active, and therefore influential, part of the people, have generally embraced the idea that they would never be renewed. Here, as elsewhere, the wish became the father to the thought; the immediate interests of men determined their opinions and regulated their conduct. The pacific interests of the Empire had increased so immensely during the long peace; so many fortunes and establishments had become dependant on its continuance; exports, imports, and manufactures, had been so enormously augmented by the growth of our Colonial Empire, and the preservation of peace with the rest of the world, that all persons interested in those branches of industry turned with a shudder from the very thoughts of its interruption. To this class the Reform Bill, by giving a majority in the House of Commons, yielded the government of the State. To the astonishment of every thinking or well-informed man in the world, the doctrine was openly promulgated, to admiring and assenting audiences in Manchester and Glasgow, by the most popular orators of the day, that the era of war had passed away; that it was to be classed hereafter with the age of the mammoth and the mastodon; and that, in contemplation of the speedy arrival of the much-desired Millennium, our wisdom would be to disband our troops, sell our ships of the line, and trust to pacific interest in future to adjust or avert the differences of nations. The members for the boroughs—three-fifths of the House of Commons—openly embraced or in secret inclined to these doctrines; and how clearly soever the superior information of our rulers might detect their fallacy, the influence of their adherents was paramount in the Legislature, and Government was compelled, as the price of existence, in part at least, to yield to their suggestions.

The danger of acting upon such Utopian ideas has been much augmented, in the case of this country, by the commercial policy at the same time pursued by the dominant class who had come to entertain them. If it be true, as the wisest of men have affirmed in every age, and as universal experience has proved, that the true source of riches, as well as independence, is to be found in the cultivation of the soil, and that a nation which has come to depend for a considerable part of its subsistence on foreign states has made the first step to subjugation, the real patriot will find ample subject of regret and alarm in the present condition of Great Britain. Not only are ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of the national consumption, now imported from abroad, but nearly the half of this immense importation is of wheat, the staple food of the people, of which a third comes from foreign parts. Not only is the price of this great quantity of grain—certainly not less than twelve millions sterling—lost to the nation, but so large a portion of its food has come to be derived from foreign nations, that the mere threat of closing their harbours may render it a matter of necessity for Great Britain to submit to any terms which they may choose to exact. Our Colonies, once so loyal and great a support to the mother country, have been so thoroughly alienated by the commercial policy of the last few years, which has deprived them of all the advantages they enjoyed from their connection with it, that they have become a burden rather than a benefit. One-half of our diminutive army is absorbed in garrisoning their forts to guard against revolt. Lastly, the navy, once our pride and glory, and the only certain safeguard either against the dangers of foreign invasion, or the blockade of our harbours and ruin of our commerce, is fast melting away; for the reciprocity system established in 1823, and the repeal of the navigation laws in 1849, have given such encouragement to foreign shipping in preference to our own, that in a few years, if the same system continue, more than half of our whole commerce will have passed into the hands of foreign states, which may any day become hostile ones.

To complete the perils of Great Britain, arising out of the very magnitude of its former triumphs and extent of its empire, while so many causes were conspiring to weaken its internal strength, and disqualify it for withstanding the assault of a formidable enemy, others, perhaps more pressing, were alienating foreign nations, breaking up old alliances, and tending more and more to isolate England in the midst of European hostility. The triumph of the democratic principle, by the Revolution of 1830 in France, was the cause of this; for it at once induced an entire change of government and foreign policy in England, and substituted new revolutionary for the old conservative alliances. Great Britain no longer appeared as the champion of order, but as the friend of rebellion; revolutionary dynasties were, by her influence, joined with that of France, established in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal; and the policy of our Cabinet avowedly was to establish an alliance of constitutional sovereigns in Western, which might counter balance the coalition of despots in Eastern, Europe. This system has been constantly pursued, and for long with ability and success by our Government. Strong in the support of France, whether under a "throne, surrounded by republican institutions," or under those institutions themselves, England became indifferent to the jealousy of the other continental powers; and in the attempt to extend the spread of liberal institutions, or the sympathy openly expressed for foreign rebels, irritated beyond forgiveness the cabinets of St Petersburg, Vienna, and Berlin. While the French alliance continued, these powers were constrained to devour their indignation in silence; they did not venture, with the embers of revolt slumbering in their own dominions, to brave the combined hostility of France and England. But all alliances formed on identity of feeling, not interest, are ephemeral in their duration. A single day destroyed the whole fabric on which we rested for our security. Revolutionary violence everywhere worked out its natural and unavoidable result in the principal continental states. A military despotism was, after a sanguinary struggle, established in Austria and Prussia; the 2d December arrived in France, and that power in an instant was turned over to the side of the absolute governments on the Continent. Our efforts to revolutionise Europe have ended in the establishment of military despotisms in all its principal states, supported by fifteen hundred thousand armed men—our boasted alliance with France, in the placing of it in the very front rank of what may eventually become the league of our enemies.

Lord Palmerston, by whom our foreign policy for the last twenty years has been mainly conducted, is a man of great talent, both for eloquence and business, and of extraordinary energy and powers of application. The charm and grace of his manners are such that they disarm the most hostile of his opponents in the intercourse of private society; and such was the vigour of his application, that he conducted nearly the whole business of the Foreign Office himself, and reduced the labour of his secretaries and clerks to the mere copying of despatches and answering routine letters. He was perfectly master of all the details of his department, and is probably better acquainted than any man alive with the intricacies of a diplomacy, which, from the commanding position of England, has come to embrace the whole civilised world. No man, when called to account in Parliament for any of his acts which had brought the country to the very verge of hostility, could defend himself with more intrepidity, or carry away the House by a more eloquent and intrepid assertion of the principles, or appeal to the feelings, which find a responsive echo in the most moving, because the noblest and most disinterested, chords of the British heart.

Yet, with all this, he was one of the most dangerous Ministers that ever held the portfolio of the Foreign Office in Great Britain; and at the period he was displaced, his removal had become, in a manner, a matter of necessity, if we would avoid an immediate rupture with the principal Continental powers. The reason was, that his ideas were entirely at variance with the policy of the ruling party in the country; and his ambition for his country not less inconsistent with the situation into which, by the general policy of the Cabinet, it had been brought, and the views which he himself entertained on the social institutions of the world. He had been bred in the school of Mr Pitt and Lord Castlereagh, and his ideas of the position and influence of England were founded on the state of the country when it had a million of men in arms and a thousand vessels of war in the royal navy. He forgot that this was not the condition of the country after thirty years of unbroken peace; that the spirit which called forth such vast armaments had expired with the necessities which created it; that 1851 was not 1815, nor the school of Mr Cobden that of Mr Pitt. The consequence was, that by his dignified and patriotic, but withal imprudent and ill-timed assertion of national demands, he brought us repeatedly to the very verge of hostility with the most formidable powers on the Continent, at the very time when, from the total want of any preparation for hostilities in the country, and the pitiable state of weakness to which our defensive establishments had been reduced, nothing but disaster was to be anticipated from their commencement.

These dangers were rendered still more pressing by the extreme divergence between his political principles and those of the cabinets of the ruling powers, formerly the allies of England, who directed the destinies of the Continent. He supported openly, so far as he could—favoured covertly when this was impossible—the cause of revolution all over the world. He aided, by the fleets of England, the establishment of one revolutionary throne in Belgium—by the marines and volunteers, of another in Spain. He concluded the quadruple alliance to force revolutionary queens upon a reluctant people in both kingdoms of the Peninsula. He covertly aided in the spread of liberal ideas in Italy—openly in supporting the insurgents in Sicily. He took Russia by the beard in the Dardanelles, on account of the Hungarian insurgents; and afterwards, for a wretched private dispute at Athens, ranged France by her side;—all but brought on a war with France by the bombardment of Beyrout and hostilities against Greece; and irritated Austria past forgiveness by the open sympathy expressed for the Hungarian insurgents. Such conduct might be manly and consistent: a nation which goes about over the world supporting the cause of revolutions everywhere, and presenting to every state the alternative of war or liberal institutions, may be consistent; but its rulers are next to insane if they are not prepared for the consequences of such aggressions, and provoke the combined hostility of the greatest powers, at a time when their country is barely able to sustain the attack of the smallest.

The great reliance of England throughout this long course of revolutionary encouragement and aggression, was on the alliance with France, and the fond belief entertained by our liberal rulers that the attente cordiale would be perpetual, and form a national compact which would effectually screen us, whatever we did, from the hostility of the despotic powers on the Continent. The Revolution of December 2, 1851, in Paris, and the subsequent approval of military despotism by seven millions and a half of French citizens, may teach us what foundation there is for such a hope, or what reliance, in this free country, there is to be placed on identity of feeling with a military power, which begins its career with the deportation of some thousand citizens to Cayenne without trial, the decimation of the Assembly, dissolution of the National Guard, and promulgation, with general consent, of the despotic institutions of Napoleon. The dangers arising from those changes to the alliance with England, are so obvious that they have attracted universal attention; and Government, however pacifically inclined, and however much under the control of the Manchester clique, are most properly taking measures to provide against the danger. Sheerness and Tilbury forts have been armed, and their magazines filled; two new batteries, of a hundred guns each, traced out at Plymouth; fortified camps, it is said, are to be formed round London, and a considerable addition made to our land and sea forces. We regret as much as any one can do, the necessity which exists for these changes; but the career of Liberalism, and of patronising revolutions all over the world, which we have pursued for the last twenty years, could not by possibility terminate in any other result.

What makes us augur more favourably than we have done for long, on the state of the country, notwithstanding these accumulating foreign dangers, is, that the national mind at home seems to be at length awakening to a sense of the perils which threaten the Empire. We have the greatest pleasure in quoting the following article from the Times on this all-important subject, which is the more valuable as that able journal has so long derided the idea of any danger being to be apprehended from foreign hostility:—

"At the accession of Harold to the crown, the English had enjoyed a peace of nearly fifty years, purchased by the final expulsion and destruction of their Danish invaders; they were becoming more and more enamoured of the arts of peace, and had made considerable progress in such civilisation as the times allowed. Agriculture was cultivated with great assiduity and success, and the national mind began to appreciate the benefits to be derived from foreign trade and commerce. The military spirit which had animated the descendants of Hengist and Horsa was gradually dying out, and the nation, united under one head, looked back with disgust and contempt on the obscure and bloody civil wars of the Heptarchy. The fortifications of the towns were allowed to fall into decay, and the equipment and discipline of the troops were almost entirely neglected. Dwelling in peace and security under their free elective institutions, the English looked with gradually increasing disfavour on the profession of arms. While the mailed chivalry of Normandy were carrying their banners even to the islands and peninsulas of the Mediteranean, the Saxon was content to fight on foot and to protect himself from the blows of a steel-clad man-at-arms by the imperfect defence of a surcoat of hide. His offensive arms were as imperfect as his defensive; he relied almost exclusively on the ponderous battleaxe, which, requiring both hands to wield it, necessarily left the person of the soldier exposed to the lance or the arrow. Yet, with all this, the nation was possessed by a spirit of the most overweening confidence and self-satisfied security. Proud of the exploits of their ancestors, believing in the perpetuity of the long peace they had enjoyed, satisfied with their republican institutions, and mistaking internal freedom for external strength, they looked with inert tranquillity on the gradual increase and organization of the power which was to overwhelm them; and when at last the blow fell, the nation, at once confident in its valour and impatient of military fatigue and privations, flung away its hopes in a single unequal conflict rather than endure the slow and desolating tactics which must have worn out the strength of the invader. The English met their enemies with one-third of their number, believing as devoutly as the pothouse heroes of our own times that one Englishman to three Frenchmen was a perfectly equal match, and that the total absence of cavalry and artillery on their side would be easily compensated by superior personal bravery. The nation was, at any rate, content to abide the trial, thinking that even if this army miscarried, it would be easy to overwhelm the invaders by a general rising. The army fell, and the nation with it.

"It may seem almost superfluous to apply this analogy to the state of modern England. We also have been in the enjoyment of a long and profound peace, and have learnt to consider a war as Something almost impossible. We also have entirely outlived the military spirit of the earlier years of this century, and in the pursuit of wealth and in the development of civilization have half learnt to believe in the preachers of a millennium, of the peaceful sweets of which we have already had a foretaste. We also take no care for the fortification of our country or the equipment of our troops. We arm them with weapons which are all but harmless; we load them with accoutrements which are worse than useless; and we sedulously and successfully endeavour to render them incapable of bearing fatigue and hardship. Our navy is employed in training sailors, and, as soon as we have succeeded in rendering them expert seamen and gunners, we dismiss them to enter into the service of foreign nations. Our infantry can hardly march, our cavalry can hardly ride. These troops, so armed, so disciplined, and so accoutred, are extremely scanty in numbers; and those numbers we have materially diminished by sending ten thousand of our best to make war upon savages five hundred miles on the other side of the tropic of Capricorn. Yet, under all these circumstances, we entertain an unbounded confidence in our own resources and position—we mistake the internal balance and equipoise of our polity for the power of resisting external force. We view without apprehension an enormous military power beside us, assuming a position which renders foreign war almost a necessity of its existence. We talk of our old victories by land and by sea, and forget that they were gained by men whose arms and training placed them on an equality with their antagonists. We rely on our insular position, which protected us so efficiently against Napoleon the Great, and insist upon the impregnable trench that surrounds us, although science has effectually bridged it over for Napoleon the Little. We forget the existence of the new power of steam, and the means of organising combined and unlooked-for movements afforded by the electric telegraph. We believe that if the storm with which France is now pregnant does burst, it will be upon the great military powers of the Continent, who sympathise with the proceedings of her government, who possess enormous military resources, and who offer but a poor prize to the victor, instead of upon us, whose free institutions are a daily reproach to the slavery and tyranny which disgrace France, whose military resources are such as we have described, and whose rich shores have not seen the footprint of a foreign army since the days of King John. Stranger still, we believe that we are secure against any sudden blow, and base this agreeable conviction on the good faith of a man who is what he now is solely because he has been able to dissemble and to deceive, to swear and to forswear. Strangest of all, we believe that if a French army should effect a landing, there is some unknown force in the population of this country which would overwhelm and absorb them; and that, while every other people in Europe has proved utterly unable to contend against military discipline, ours, the least warlike of any, will easily succeed where they have failed. The historic parallel seems tolerably close as regards the antecedents; let us hope, for the sake of this island and the cause of civilisation and liberty all over the world, that similar causes may not, in our time, result in a similar catastrophe.

"If disasters are destined for this country in its military and naval operations, they will, at least, not arrive without warning. The visitations of the last year have been absolutely ominous. As if to show us the futility of the resources on which we are relying, our ships have broken down, our stores have been condemned, our firearms have proved useless, and our soldiers are found incapacitated by their equipments from encountering half their number of naked savages. It would be hard to overlook such tokens of evil. If, with all our vaunted wealth and skill, we cannot send reinforcements to the Cape without miscarriages, or victual our vessels without peril of pestilence, what is to become of us in the face of such hostilities as men now living can well remember, and may see again?"—Times, Jan. 8 and 10, 1852.

It is a curious coincidence that the views here so ably and energetically put forth by the great organ of the moneyed and commercial interests, are precisely those which we have been constantly enforcing in this miscellany for many years past, and in an especial manner unfolded on this day year, February 1, 1851.[61] No one need be told with what ridicule these views were received by the whole Manchester school of politicians, and especially by the able journal which has now so powerfully advocated them.

If views of this kind are entertained by the influential bodies who now rule the State, and they are acted upon by an able and energetic Government, there is no cause for despondence as to the external dangers which, from the necessary consequences of our own acts, now menace the British Empire. If the powers which may join to assail us are now much stronger and more united than they were in the time of Napoleon, our resources have augmented in a similar proportion. We have the means of defence and security in our own hands, if we will only make use of them. But it is not by a suicidal policy, and sacrificing everything to the foreigner, while he is contemplating the sacrificing us to himself, that this vital object is to be attained. Our whole dangers, external and internal, are of our own creation. But for the infatuation of our rulers and people, not one of them would have had any existence. But for the sacrifice of the national industry to the moneyed and manufacturing interests by our Monetary and Free Trade system, we might, five years ago, by merely keeping up the Sinking Fund as it stood at the battle of Waterloo, have paid off every shilling of our National Debt, and now reduced our taxation from fifty to twenty-five millions, and yet maintained an army of two hundred thousand men, and a fleet of fifty ships of the line and a hundred steamers, which would have enabled us to bid defiance to the hostility, by land and sea, of combined Europe. Instead of our Colonial Empire being on the verge of dissolution, from universal irritation at our Home Government, and the principal states of Europe in a state of suppressed hostility, from injuries that can never be forgiven, we might have had a flourishing and contented Colonial Empire, and steady friends in our old allies among the Continental states. Possibly it is too late to remedy the evils arising from the infatuated policy we have so long pursued at home and abroad; but this much is certain, that if anything can avert our dangers, it is the wisdom which can discern—the courage which can face them—and the magnanimity which can amend the errors from which they have arisen.

Minor typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as printed.

The cover for the eBook version of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.