Napoleon began a career of conquest which threatened to lay all Europe at his feet. He was lawless, faithless, and incapable of being treated with, for he could not be bound by any treaty. There was nothing for it but by force, and combined force, to put him down.

True, in our attempt on the internal liberties of a great nation we had raised a power, a spirit; and out of the midst of this spirit or atmosphere of enthusiastic and patriotic defiance, an apparition that rose towering above our heads, and threatened to destroy all that resisted. He broke down all obstacles to his ascension to the day, and trod scornfully under his feet all the nations of the continent, and their despots. Napoleon was, indeed, possessed with a spirit of insatiable conquest, and of haughty, insolent domination that demanded justly repulse and humiliation. But here comes the all-important question, a question most commonly lost sight of-Whose business was it to do this? Was it for England quixotically to take upon herself almost the whole giant contest? Was she to stand in all parts and places with money-bags, with men, with arms, with ships, to defend not merely herself, but the whole world? Was it proper, or demanded by sound reason, by common sense, nay, even by interest, sympathy, or humanity, the most urgent and god-like reason of all, that England should waste her energies, impoverish her people, and mortgage her property for countless generations to come, to rescue all other people?

First, we must inquire whether these people were rescuable by such means, and at such stupendous sacrifices; whether they were at the time, and for a long time, rescuable by any

means.

We admit that England acted a great and generous part; and that in the terrific contest, her strength, her resources, her bravery, and indomitable spirit, developed themselves in a magnificent degree; but still there comes the question, Was our conduct as wise and business-like as it was generous? Was our unbounded aid actually necessary and prudently applied? We answer that our conduct, taken in the best light, was that of a generous madman. The man who should think of beating down the walls of Newgate with his own soft hand, in order to liberate an imprisoned friend, were not more insane.

It is a great truth-one which should be written large on the council-chamber walls of every people-that A NATION WHICH CANNOT DEFEND ITS OWN INSTITUTIONS IS NOT WORTHY OF THEM, FAR LESS

WORTHY OF BEING DEFENDED BY OTHERS. It is another truth, equally sure, that no nation can maintain the liberties of another, which is not capable of defending its own. But here

was not a single nation, but a whole continent, impotent against a single nation. Here was a mighty constellation of nationsGermany, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Italy, nations of some hundreds of millions of inhabitants-all incapable of defending themselves against France, a nation of some forty millions of people.

There must have been a cause for this, far deeper than the genius of the French commanders, or the rapid mastership of French military tactics. There was! It was the effeminacy and degradation of these nations, the consequence of despotic government, and aristocratic disintegration. A writer who has, perhaps more than any other, contended for the justice and nescessity of this war, the writer of Knight's History, yet says "In reflecting on the power, the decision, and undoubted military genius of Buonaparte, people have left too much out of consideration the miserable folly and wickedness of continental governments who made up his game for him, and played into his hands; who put the knife into his grasp, nor complained, nor attempted to wrest it from him till they found it at their own throats." Russia was a great horde of barbarous serfs; Poland had been first unnationed by its aristocrats, and then dismembered by its vulture neighbours; Germany was carved, by the usurpations of its aristocracy, into two thousand small states. The rest of the nations were equally enslaved and emasculated, and they fell an easy prey.

Now, under such circumstances, as the English government should have asked, and would have soon learned from experience, was it possible to help such people? The rapid ascendancy of France was a lesson from Heaven on the necessity of keeping alive in a nation the popular spirit, and a manly spirit of active union. God," says the adage, "helps those who help themselves." It is a sublime truism; and no mortal or immortal power can help those who cannot help themselves. The nation that cannot maintain its freedom against its own government, cannot maintain it against external foes.

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Before those nations could, therefore, be rescued, and the career of Napoleon stopped, it was absolutely necessary that they should pass through the baptism of a bloody and cruel regeneration. They must be beaten, trodden on, insulted, robbed, and tortured in body, mind, honour and estate; in every feeling of manly pride and spirit, till they rose in the rekindled wrath of actual men, and then, and not till then, would the foe retreat before them. "You may depend upon it," said the gallant Blücher in 1806 to Bourrienne, the French minister at Hamburgh, "that when once a whole nation is determined to shake

off a humiliating yoke, it will succeed. I rely on the future. It is impossible but that the time will come when all Europe, humbled by your Emperor's exactions, and impatient of his depredations, will rise up against him. The more he enslaves nations, the more terrible will be the reaction when they break their chains." If our insane ministers had but had the knowledge of human nature which this wise and brave man possessed, and had relied on the future; had they waited till the nations were scourged by Gallic insolence into the true chain-breaking temper, instead of throwing their money by handfuls amongst effeminate slaves and selfish despots; had they waited for the moment of the rising of the real spirit of independence, they might have spared us our national debt, and yet have come in at the rescue of Europe. For Blücher's words were a prophecy; and in vain did Buonaparte, for nearly twenty years, goad, tread upon and insult the spiritless dreamers of Germany; they awoke not to a sense of their national degradation, and all our wealth and arms were thrown away upon them.

Regardless, or ignorant of this great truth, we went on from year to year, putting arms into hands that at the first sight of an enemy ran away and left them. We subsidized monarchs with our annual millions, to raise troops and fight for their own hearths and homes, and the French came and levied this very money in contribution. We actually maintained the war for the French, and furnished them with arms and money to fight against our soulless allies and ourselves!

If the history of our continental subsidies and their application could be written in its naked reality, and as it is ridiculed on the continent, it would present a revolting and humiliating scene. The hard-earned money wrung from our own brave and hard-working people, till they rose in their misery, and even threatened king and government with destruction, went to be divided amongst a host of despots and harem slaves. It went to pamper the sloth and lust of whole styes of great Westphalian boars, and other German swine. It went to pay the debts and mistresses of men that were loathed by their own people as monsters of sensual filth and grovelling petty princes who had not a soldier to bring into the field, such was the ignorance or the criminal carelessness of our Government, received large sums with which they satisfied greedy concubines and long-waiting creditors, and then plunged into still deeper sensual mire, in reliance on the lavish, unscrutinizing, and exhaustless subsidies of England. The stories of such facts that are circulated in Germany, are painful to English ears.

Those princes that did bring men into the field, such as the

Hessians, Brunswickers, &c.,-the Menschen-Verkaüfer, or Mansellers, as they are styled by their own people, were rapacious beyond all example. During the American war, we had employed these Hessians, Brunswickers, and the like, at a cost that excited general indignation. Besides paying 77. 10s. for every man, the Duke of Brunswick, who furnished only 4084 men, had an annual subsidy of 15,5197. The Landgrave of HesseCassel, who furnished 12,000 men, had 10,2817. a-year; the hereditary Prince of Hesse, for his miserable quota of 688 men, had his 60007. a-year! And besides this, we were bound to defend their territories from all attack! Nay, besides their annual subsidies, Brunswick was to receive double subsidies for two years after his troops were dismissed; and the others, like advantages. In short, these Mansellers had sold their slavesthe offscouring of their population, not raised as now by conscription, but raked together by any means,-something dear, about 17,000 mercenaries costing us a million and a half yearly. In the French war our bargains with these people were equally absurd. The Hessians had the like proportion of pay and subsidy; and the Duke of Brunswick for his wretched knot of 2289 men, his 16,000l. a-year subsidy! But, as we have said, this was not all;-we paid the Great Powers to our own actual mischief. We paid the Emperor of Austria from two to four millions yearly. The Austrians were, perhaps, the most honest in the cause of all the Germans, and fought very doggedly, but with little judgment, and less success. They were so slow that they were actually useless in any attempts to co-operate with them. Nelson, who was sent to assist the South of Italy in conjunction with them, in 1794, was driven almost frantic by them. "This army," said he, "is slow beyond all description, and I begin to think the Emperor is anxious to touch another five millions of English money. As for these German generals, war is their trade, and peace is ruin to them; therefore, we cannot expect that they shall have any wish to finish the war.'

The subsidizing of Austria continued up to 1797, in which year we find in April a vote of 2,000,000l. to the Emperor, 1,200,000l. having been sent him only in November previous; and in the following October he made peace with Buonaparte at Campo Formio, and his states became subject to French levies which our money went to pay. Again, encouraged by a promise of money, the Emperor Francis declared war in 1809 on Buonaparte. This was done in May; and in October of the same year, in about five months, Buonaparte was in the Em

* Southey's Life of Nelson.

peror's capital, and levied 3,000,000l. of English money on him for the expenses of the war.

Russia we subsidized at the rate of from two to three millions a-year. In 1799 we were paying the Emperor Paul 112,000l. a-month, with which money he built and repaired men of war, and in the following year swept with them our merchantmen out of the Baltic and Northern Seas; and we find the king of England announcing to his Parliament in April, 1801, that his late subsidized ally "had already committed great outrages on the ships, persons, and property of his subjects," having made a league with our enemies of Sweden and Denmark to do all possible mischief to our trade and people in the north, and to cut off from us all necessary supplies of corn thence !

This was madness enough on our part, but was far from the worst. We were not only subsidizing all, even the smallest powers of Europe, such as Sardinia, at 400,000/ a-year, but we were actually in league with all the most confirmed villains in it, down to the very Dey of Algiers, who was, in fact, licensed by us to practise his corsair atrocities on Christian nations.* At the very announcement of our coalition against France, who were our allies? Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the very powers that for years we have so vehemently taunted with the violent dismemberment of Poland. In 1793, when we had issued high-sounding manifestoes, that we and our allies were going to chastise the French for their crimes and their robberies, and our Duke of York had advanced into the Netherlands to meet those allies, where were they? Busy in robbing and dividing Poland amongst themselves! "The arguments used by the spoilers," says the historian, "threw ridicule and discredit on our manifestoes, and made the French believe that the coalition meant also to plunder and partition France.'

It was a melancholy farce. We were pretending to enforce justice on a great nation, in company with the most notorious robbers in all Europe. This unfortunately, however, was but one occasion of this kind; a still worse occurred in 1794.The allies were again preparing to make a grand stand against the French in the Netherlands. The king of Prussia, who had in reality been tampering with the enemy for a separate peace, declared, that unless he had a grant immediately of 2,200,000l., he would march off. The money was granted, as money always was, if asked for, even under the most suspicious or absurd circumstances as the present, and he did march off still, and to some purpose. He did not appear in the field at the time

* Knight's Hist. of England, vol. viii.