6. The Fall of England! The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. By a Contributor to "Blackwood." New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons. 1871. 12mo. pp. 66.

A COLLECTION of English invasion-panic literature would make a rare addition to any of our public libraries. Some two thousand years ago it was a boast of the Spartans that no Lacedæmonian woman had ever seen the smoke of a hostile camp-fire. It is now more than sixscore years since any spectacle of this kind has offended the eyes of the English matron; but, in spite of this long-continued immunity the Briton periodically indulges in a paroxysm of alarm over some vividly pictured invasion, which he solemnly, and to the great amusement of his neighbors, succeeds in persuading himself is imminent. These flurries always follow a certain course and lead to one result. A bête noir is first settled upon; some foreign nation, usually France, though upon occasion Russia, Prussia, or even America, will do almost as well, is decided to be bent upon sacking London and humiliating England, and proof positive of this evil intention is deduced from the fact that the people in question is notoriously evil disposed, and has recently won a victory, or has invented an improved system of armament, or is fortifying a harbor, or equipping a fleet. The half-pay officer and professional alarmist take up the cry. The "outs" join lustily in it. The "ins" follow the "outs." The inefficiency of every branch of the national defences is scathingly exposed; it is proved to general satisfaction that England has no army and no navy, and indeed enjoys a continued national existence only through foreign sufferance. Parliament scolds; the poetlaureate fires the British heart with some doggerel, "Form! form! riflemen, form!" etc.; innumerable respectable shopkeepers and middle-aged professional gentlemen make themselves ridiculous by trying to learn the goose-step; Punch depicts some leading member of the Peace Society as a donkey braying at the muzzle of a loaded cannon; the "Times" thunders; the Ministry looks immensely wise and grave, and refers with awful mystery to "information which it would not be judicious at this moment to make public "; and then, having provided for an expenditure of a few millions of money, Parliament adjourns with a sense of gratitude that something is now in a way of being done; and a waking sobriety begins to make itself felt. Does the Briton ever feel silly after one of these self-inflicted penances? never knows; he certainly does not confess it. humiliate a people, it should be in some calmer moment to turn from a perusal of the two hundred thousandth of "The Battle of Dorking," and the flood of other literature of a like character which deluged

That, the outer world Yet if anything could

England at the close of the Franco-Prussic war of 1870, to a study of Richard Cobden's pamphlet of ten years before, entitled "The Three Panics: An Historical Episode." He there, with pitiless precision and calmness, describes three great flurries, each more senseless than the one which preceded it, which swept over the British Isles in the brief space of fifteen years, between 1847 and 1861. The oldest, the most sagacious, and the boldest British statesmen contorted themselves during that period no less unnecessarily than did a parcel of old women, who either never had had any nerve, or whose nerves were completely gone. The aged Duke of Wellington, and the yet more aged Lord Lyndhurst, the jaunty Palmerston, the matter-of-fact Russell, and the fiery Derby, each in his turn pulled on the cap-and-bells, and, before astonished Europe, vied with a monomaniac like old Sir Charles Napier or a sensationalist like Mr. Horsman, in the contortions of alarm.

It really seems as if the ingenious author of "The Battle of Dorking" must have got all but the details of his story from some of the extravagances of these eminent men. That such statements should ever have been made as are now on the record of those fifteen years seems incredible. For instance, the Duke of Wellington asserted" that, excepting immediately under the fire of Dover Castle, there is not a spot on the coast on which infantry might not be thrown on shore at any time of tide, with any wind and in any weather," etc. The Duke of Wellington's assertion upon such a point was of course conclusive; it can only be said in reply, that it is a great pity that the advantages in this respect enjoyed by infantry cannot be shared also by the travelling public. Lord Ellesmere, so long ago as 1848, foresaw all the horrors of " Dorking," for he then published a letter in which he described how "in case of an invasion, the Guards would march out at one end of the metropolis as the French entered at the other, and that on the Lord Mayor would be imposed the duty of converting the Mansion House into a place where billets would be found for the foreign army." Lord Palmerston also might lay claims to some part of the Dorking brochure, for, in describing the rapidity with which an invasion might be made, he actually had the audacity to assert in Parliament that "the very ship despatched to convey to this country intelligence of the threatened armament would probably not reach our shores much sooner than the hostile expedition." Lord Ellenborough, in the midst of profound peace, next cried out for " seventy line-of-battle ships," and, also, "for forts to protect all the ports, and all the roads in which it would be possible for an enemy to place a fleet," etc. Then Mr. Horsman made himself ridiculous with a picture of "London taken," and cried aloud that "no human tongue could tell how suddenly it might arrive, and that it might still be distant was our

good fortune, of which we should make the most. Every public or private yard should be put in full work; every artificer and extra hand should work extra hours, as if the war were to begin next week. As gunboats could be built more rapidly than men-of-war, gun-boats should be multiplied as fast as possible; as volunteers could be enrolled faster than the line, they should at once be raised; as rifles could not be made fast enough in England, we should renew that order in Belgium, even though they should cost sixpence apiece more than the Horse Guards regulation; and, night and day, the process of manufacturing, constructing, arming, drilling, should go on till the country was made safe, and then we might desist from preparations, and return to our peace expenditure, with the certainty that these humiliating, lowering, and degrading panic cries of invasion would never disturb our country or our government again.”

Finally, poor old Sir Charles Napier raised his maddened scream of alarm until his voice fairly rung out above all the panic-stricken chorus: "France is equal to us in ships and superior in the means of manning them. She has an army of 300,000 or 400,000 men, and we have but 20,000 in Great Britain. What would the consequence be if a war were to spring up? Why, there would be an invasion immediately. ... Let the House look at our condition at the present moment. We have no Channel fleet. In a few months we shall not have a lineof-battle ship in England; and, in case of a sudden war with France and Russia, I do not believe the Queen's throne would be worth six months' purchase." Then he described Cherbourg, and peopled its huge docks with phantom ships, describing how "the troops could walk on board; cavalry, mounted on their horses, could ride on board; and artillery could easily be shipped, for thirty sail of the line could lie alongside of the wharves alone." This practical and surprising introduction of horse marines into actual service sufficed only for a moment; the next year his mind was filled with visions of the Russian fleet coming up the Channel; and he at last fairly overcame the gravity of the Commons by a piteous exclamation that, in such an emergency, “what would become of the Funds, God only knows." Apparently, however, the information in this last respect has since 1859 been more generally imparted, as the veracious narrator of the Dorking conflict is particular to inform us that, upon the occurrence of a similar calamity in 1875, the Funds fell to exactly 35.

We do not propose to make any criticism upon either the literary or military talent displayed by the author of this most successful squib. In fact it hardly merits any such notice. It is certainly very cleverly done, but the most remarkable thing about it has been the pure good NO. 233.

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fortune with which it happened, like its far less meritorious predecessor, "Dame Europa's School," to drop into a condition of the public mind exactly predisposed to receive it. The author has simply drawn a very great prize in a very old lottery. His name has, we believe, never yet been announced, but he evidently is or has been himself a soldier; there is a very strong suspicion of red-tape and pipe-clay both in his military dispositions and his comments on volunteer soldiery. He is probably a man who would heartily concur in the remark attributed to Von Moltke, that he had never read any account of the late civil war in America, because he did not like to have his mind confused with what was really nothing but the report of the doings of a mob. Certainly if any sane American graduate of our late war, whether general, colonel, or captain, were to draw up his men in the method described in the battle of Dorking, he would richly deserve to be beaten first and court-martialled afterwards. Have European nations never yet heard of the shovel and the temporary earthwork as important protections for young troops against the modern arms of precision? Judging by the recent French and Austrian wars, there would seem great reason to conclude that this is the case. If it is so, Von Moltke to the contrary notwithstanding, they all have something yet to learn from what a previous contributor to "Blackwood," Mr. Cornelius O'Dowd, once facetiously described as "the fight over the way," where "two madmen were engaged in a struggle not one single rule or maxim of which did they comprehend."

Upon the occasion of a similar flurry several years ago, that hardheaded old Scotchman, Mr. Joseph Hume, somewhat roughly remarked in the House of Commons, "Our present panics are not due, as in times past, to the old women, but to our having too many clubs about London, containing so many half-pay officers, who had nothing to do but to look about for themselves and their friends. These were the people who wrote to the newspapers, anxious to bring grist to the mill somehow or other." This home truth was uttered in 1851; but unless we are gravely mistaken, it indicates pretty clearly the source from whence originated both the English invasion panic of 1871 and its most successful literary expression.

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American Review.