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The History of Europe.

destruction of altars; its woes, its blood, and its suffering. In the general deluge thus suddenly falling on a sinful world, the mass of mankind in all ranks still clung to their former vices. They were, as of old, marrying and giving in marriage when the waters burst upon them. But the ark of salvation had been prepared by more than mortal hands. The handwriting on the wall was perceived by the gifted few to whom Providence had unlocked the fountains of original thought; and in the highest class of intellect was soon to be discerned the elevating influence of trial and suffering on the human mind."

We are glad to find the historian pausing on his way to more showy and tumultuous themes, to do honour, which was but to do justice, to the memory of George the Third. The faction which that honest and highprincipled monarch excluded from the means of public mischief during his reign, have taken the base revenge of calumny since his decease; and it is only the duty of history, which will live when pamphleteering bitterness, and the hedge-firing hostility of reviews, are sunk in contemptuous oblivion, to pay the national tribute to the most English sovereign that ever sat upon the throne.

"No monarch was ever better adapted for the arduous and momentous duty to which he was called, or possessed qualities more peculiarly fitted for the difficulties with which, during his long reign, he had to contend. Born and bred in England, he gloried, as he himself said, in the name of Briton. Educated

in the principles of the Protestant religion, he looked to their maintenance not only as his first duty, but as the only safeguard of his throne. Simple in his habits, moderate in his desires, unostentatious in his tastes, he preferred, amidst the seductions of a palace, the purity and virtues of domestic life. His education had been neglected-his information was not extensive; but he possessed, in a very high degree, that native sagacity and just discrimination, for the want of which no intellectual cultivation can afford any compensation, and which are so often found more than adequate to supply the place of the most brilliant and even solid acquisitions. He inherited from his father the hereditary courage and firmness of his race. peated occasions, when his life was attempted, he evinced a rare and perso

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during the dreadful riots of 1780, to ride nal intrepidity; and when he proposed, [July, of the fires of his capital, he did no at the head of his guards into the midst more than what his simple heart told less, bespoke the monarch fitted to him was his duty, but what, neverthequench the conflagration of Europe. Though quick in conversation, as kings generally are, he could not be said to strength of his intellect enabled him to have an acute mind; and yet the native detect at once any sophistry which interfered with the just sense he always entertained of his public or religious duties. When Mr Dundas, in the course of conversation on the Catholic claims,

previous to Mr Pitt's retirement on that ed argument, that the Coronation oath ground in 1800, urged the often repeatwas taken by him only in relation to his executive duties, he at once replied, 'Come, come, Mr Dundas, let us have none of your Scotch metaphysics.'

*

The firmness which he exhibited on occasion of the run upon the Bank and the mutiny of the Nore, in 1797, brought the nation safely through the most danflexible determination, in 1807, to adgerous crisis of recent times. His inmit no compromise with the Catholics regarding the Coronation oath, averted for twenty years that loosening of the which the nation has since so grievously constitution in Church and State, under Mr Fox's India bill in 1783, he expresslaboured. When resisting, almost alone, his crown, and retire to Hanover, than ed his determination rather to resign permit it to become a law; has proved both that he had correctly and the result scanned on that occasion the feelings of the English people, and rightly appreposed measure on our eastern empire, ciated the probable effect of the proand the balance of the constitution in this country.

His determination to admit no accomprolonged that unhappy contest for years modation with the American insurgents, after even his own ministers had become aware that it was hopeless; yet even such a resolution had something magnanimous in its character. It is now city of the generals in command of his well known, that, but for the incapaarmies, his firmness would have been rewarded with success; and all must admit, that his first words to the American minister who came to his court after the peace, I was the last man in my dominions to acknowledge your indepen

dence; but I will be the first to support it, now that it has been granted,'were worthy of the sovereign of a great empire, whose moral resolution misfortune could not subdue, and whose sense of honour prosperity could not weaken. "Selecting, out of the innumerable arts which flourished in his dominions, that on which all others were dependent, he concentrated the rays of royal favour on the simple labours of the husbandman. Equalling Henry IV. in the benevolence of his wish, and outstripping both him and his own age in the justice of his discrimination, he said he hoped to live to see the day, not when all his subjects could merely read, but when every man in his dominions should have his Bible in his pocket.'”

In his remarks on the situation of public affairs under the Regency, and especially on the death of the lamented Mr Perceval, the historian presses with equal force and feeling on the perils of the contingency from which England and Europe just then escaped. The calamitous period of the war was passing away; but, if the dreaded contingency had been realized, the true calamity would only then have been beginning. The Whigs were in negotiation with the Regent; nothing but a petty dispute about three officers of the Household impeded their possession of power. If they had been Ministers of England, they were pledged instantly to have changed the policy of England, to have reversed all the measures of defiance and defence by which England had hitherto been kept in safety, and the result must have been the secure supremacy of Napoleon, and the inevitable ruin of the British cause. The peril came so close to the point that the escape was scarcely less than providential.

"The negotiation with the Whigs was broken off on the 6th June. On the

13th of the same month, Wellington crossed the Portuguese frontier, and commenced the campaign of Salamanca; while, on the 23d, Napoleon passed the Niemen, and threw his crown and his life on the precarious issue of a Russian invasion. The expulsion of the French from the Peninsula, the catastrophe of Moscow, the resurrection of Europe, were on the eve of commencing, when the continued fidelity of England to the cause of freedom hung on the doubtful balance of household appointments.

"If a change of Ministry had taken place at that time, the destinies of the

world would probably have been changed. The Whigs, fettered by their continued protestations against the war, could not, with any regard to consistency, have prosecuted it with vigour. Their unvarying prophecies of disaster from the Peninsular contest, would have paralysed all the national efforts in support of Wellington; their continued declamations on the necessity of peace, would have led them to embrace the first opportunity of coming to an accommodation with Napoleon. Alexander, mindful of their refusal of succour after the battle of Eylau, would have been shaken in his resolution after the battle of Borodino. Sweden, unsupported by English subsidies, would not have ventured to swerve from the French alliance. The occupation of Moscow would have led to a submission destructive of the

liberties of Europe; or the retreat, unthreatened, from the north, would have been spared half its horrors; at latest, peace would have been concluded with lington would have been withdrawn with the French Emperor at Prague. Wel

barren laurels from the Peninsula, Eumilitary power, and the dynasty of Na rope yet groaning under the yoke of poleon still upon the throne. In con templating the intimate connexion of such marvellous results with the apparently trivial question of household appointments in the royal palace of Great Britain, the reflecting observer, according to the temper of his mind, will indulge in the vein of pleasantry or the sentiment of thankfulness. The disciples of Voltaire, recollecting how a similar court intrigue arrested the course of Marlborough's victories in one age, and prolonged the popular rule in Great Britain in another, will inveigh against the subjection of human affairs to the direction of chance, the caprice of sove reigns, or the arts of courtiers; while the Christian philosopher, impressed with the direction of all earthly things by an Almighty hand, will discern in these apparently trivial events the unobserved springs of Supreme intelligence; and conclude, that as much as royal partialities may be the unconscious instruments of reward to an upright and strenuous, they may be the ministers of retribution to a selfish and corrupted age."

But what were the men, and what must be the faction, whose principles were thus equivalent to the subversion of the national success, and whose power would have been equivalent to the inevitable triumph of the enemies of the country? These were the

Whigs, the remnant of the Foxites in that day; but, if the remnant of a faction, degraded from even the hollow patriotism to the avowed and unques. tioned bitterness of Lord Grey, could then have endangered the empire, what must be its peril under the remnant of the Grey faction-divested of the small portion of dignity, manliness, and firmness possessed by it in either of its original forms, and now as signally destitute of political ability as either of its predecessors was of constitutional principle? We have seen Whiggism in the worst form in which it has yet stood before the country: allying itself with every popular passion for the sake of popular support submitting to be the slave of Popery for the emoluments of office; exercising power without dignity; living in favouritism, and taking refuge from the national rejection among the women of the bedchamber.

Mr Alison agreeably varies his narrative by sketches of the chief characters of the period. Among these is the late Sir Samuel Romilly; and the especial ground of his fame is stated to be his exertions, as a lawyer, in humanizing the course of law. We have great respect for Mr Alison's inpartiality, and we fully admit that an historian ought to speak with reserve of all public men: yet Sir Samuel Romilly was a Whig; and with us that simple fact sufficiently explains the unsubstantial nature of his reforms, and their feeble motives, and their utter failure. Every Whig enters on public life with professions of boundless liberality. All is virtue in his projects, and all is to be change in his progress. No matter what the subject, the Whig enlists himself at once on the side of change. Nothing is so high-sounding as harangues against all restraint, and nothing is so cheap as pledges which cost nothing but a ha

rangue.

The Slave-Trade, the Criminal Law, and the Restrictions on Popery, -the professional patriotism of every Whig aspirant adopted them all; and, if they had been ten times the number, would have adopted the whole at once. They were the stock questions of party, the stamped badge of political beggary, the vocabulary of imposture. The Whigs at length succeeded in carrying them. The ears of

a country grow weary of any din when it is rung in them for twenty years together. The legislature was tired out the folly of concession had its way-and every one of the measures is now discovered to have been as absurdly executed as it was hypocritically conceived; and, instead of abating, to have desperately increased the evil in question, or hazarded the safety of the nation. No man doubts the fitness of putting an end to the horrors of the slave trade. But what has been the result of the Whig operations? They have swelled these horrors tenfold by their rashness, their incompetence; and in their eagerness to sacrifice all discretion to the dashing effect of abolition by a word, they have tripled the trade, and doubled the misery, the vice, and the loss of life.

Of the atrocious" Popish Bill of 1829 we are now tasting the fruits; and they are poison to the Protestant, and intoxication to the Papist. But what has been the result of Romilly's labours in the criminal law? Setting aside the fact, that his personal efforts produced scarcely any effect, and that whatever has been actually brought into use was the work of those who followed him; is it not true that crimes have signally accumulated? that a more atrocious spirit has exhibited itself among the people? that stabbing has become common? that forgery has encreased to an extra ordinary degree, and that riot and rebellion have become the common shapes in which popular discontent displays itself?-all encouraged by a sense of impunity! We have as strong an aversion to cruelty and punishment as any Whig that ever talked of principle, and violated it. But laws are made for the protection, not of villains, but of honest men ; and it is not the extinction of penalty, but the extinction of crime, that should be the praise of a legislator. By the Whig code, all discretion is taken out of the hands of the judge, with the virtual effect of enabling the felon to calculate the strong temptation against the feeble punishment. On this principle, we every day see murder softened down to manslaughter, and assault to accident. The highest

penalty, with a few exceptions, is transportation, which is regarded only as an amusing change of scene-or a brief confinement in a penitentiary,

where the incarceration is accepted as a clever exchange for the labour of procuring bread by the sweat of the brow. Such are Whig reformers: always useless, because always insincere always rash, because always unprincipled-and always pushed to the verge of national danger, because nothing is easier than to be equally loud and hollow in the cause of a pretended humanity.

The charge of severity in the administration of the law in its present state, is tolerably well answered by the fact, that-though death was the appointed penalty for the larger number of 600 different offences-"out of 1872 persons, capitally convicted at the Old Bailey in the seven years from 1803 to 1810, only one had been executed." We think that Sir Samuel Romilly could not have had much to complain of in the cruelty of this administration of the law; and the habits of the people would, undoubtedly, have resisted any unnecessary recurrence to cruelty, if the judges had been so inclined." Still the "friends of humanity-the philanthropists par excellence-the Whig monopolizers of all humane feeling must chaunt their song; and the very men who applauded every step of France, when every step was knee-deep in gore, and who had no language abject enough to express their homage to the bloodiest tyrant that even France ever saw, were all thrown in attitudes of tragic agony at the whipping of a felon for housebreaking, or the hanging of a ruffian for a forgery that broke the fortunes and hearts of an

honest family. Mr Alison justly observes, that with the diminution of its sanguinary enactments, the English criminal law has felt the difficulty of secondary penalties. The multitude of the convicts who require transportation has caused the evils and sufferings of the penal settlements to increase in an alarming degree; the flood of juvenile delinquency is producing similar alarms at home. And we are to remember that all this increase is in the teeth of the most powerful exertions to give a moral education to the people, in the presence of a highly improved police, and, what is of very high consideration, in a period when a tone of virtue and piety among the leading ranks of the country is more general than at

any other time since the Reformation. Yet crime has remarkably accumulated. And what other source can be discovered but the Whig encroachments on the ancient code? We say this in illustration of our fixed belief, that no reform proceeding from Whiggism can be worth the paper on which it is written; that, with the Whig, humanity is a party cry, and honour an artifice; that his primary object is office, and that in his progress he is ready to go all lengths:-in one word, that self is every thing with the whole faction; and that until the faction is stript of all power, as it is naked of all truth, the country is in perpetual peril. Sir Samuel Romilly's memoirs, lately published, settle the question of his merits. He was a successful lawyer, and a laborious partisan, and no more; a boaster of independence, yet a struggler for place; an ostentatious patriot who effected nothing for his country; and an oratorical champion of the constitution, clinging to the skirts of Fox, by whom it was corrupted, until transferred to the skirts of his followers, by whom it was overthrown.

It is no pleasure of ours to pursue the mingled absurdities and braveries which constitute the "public spirit" of faction; but facts force the consideration on us. And if ridicule could disconnect itself from disgust on the high questions of imperial safety, we know nothing more ridiculous than the predictions of Whiggism in the great war which decided the fate of Europe. We have but to listen to the ominous declarations of the whole party, and wonder at the patience of Parliament in 1810 and 1811. We are to remember also, that those predictions were confidently made at a time when Wellington had proved the gallantry of the British soldiers in Spain, when Russia was writhing with indignation at those chains which she was preparing to burst, and when the whole Continent was either bleeding with intolerable oppression, or putting up secret prayers for the downfall of European thraldom. What then was the conduct of the faction? We find those "highpriests of liberty all round the globe" heaping new incense on the altar of the despot; those champions of the negro joining in the abject cry of submission to the great slave-master of Europe; those

clamourers for popular resistance to all legitimate authority at home, depre cating all resistance to the universal oppressor, depressing the noble spirit which bore the nation full against the fury of France; and, as far as words could go, counselling a base surrender, to a people whose only safety was in the determination to conquer or die. This was their recorded and undeniable language in the senate.

"Is there any one who in his conscience believes, that even the sacrifice of the whole British army would secure the def nce of Portugal? If such a man there be, it may with confidence be affirmed, not only that he is unfit to be intrusted with the government of the country, but even incapable of transacting public business in any deliberative assembly.

"In a financial point of view, the cause of the Peninsula is utterly hopeless. Can any man who looks at our immense exertions for the last seventeen years, assert that the annual expenditure of from three to four millions in its defence, has not been absolutely lost to Spain, fruitless to Portugal, and of no advantage whatever to this country? In fact, so utterly hopeless is the cause, that nothing short of a divine miracle can render it effectual to its proposed object. But there are higher considerations than those of mere finance, which call upon us instantly to abandon this sanguinary and unprofitable struggle. The utter impossibility of defending Portugal with the British army, aided by the Portuguese levies, is so apparent, that it is a mockery of common understanding to argue on the subject. Is there any man bold enough to assert that the British army in Portugal, aided by the native force, maintained by our subsidies, will be sufficient to resist an attack? reliance can be placed on this subsidiary force, unpractised in the operations of war, and wholly ignorant of military discipline, except what they may pick up from their British officers? That Portugal can be defended by such a force, is a thing absolutely impossible: if our troops do not take refuge in their ships, before six months is over, not a British soldier will remain in the Peninsula except as a prisoner of war."

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These oracles next decide on the fate of the Portuguese army. They are chaff before the wind of Whig wisdom.

"The Portuguese levies, upon whom so much reliance is placed, might in time, perhaps, hereafter become good

soldiers, and be capable of acting with regular troops. But when the corruption, weakness, and imbecility of the Government are taken into view, every one must be convinced of the total im

possibility of obtaining any native force capable of active co-operation with the British army. What assistance have we ever obtained from the Spanish armies, notwithstanding the high-sounding promises with which they have deluded the English troops into their territories? To expect any thing better from the Portuguese, is to put all experience at defiance. They may be useful as light troops, but cannot act with regular soldiers. Portugal, instead of being defensible from its mountains, is perhaps the most indefensible country in Europe. The experience not merely of the last seventeen years, but of the last few months, has amply demonstrated the total inefficacy of mountain ranges as a barrier against the vast forces and bold tactics of modern war. What defence has the Sierra Morena proved against the invasion of Soult? It is not by any such defences that Portugal is to be saved from the fate which has overtaken all the military monarchies of Europe. Disguise it as you will, the real question at issue is, whether the army at this moment in Portugal is to be sacrificed, as those under Sir John Moore and Lord Chatham have been; and unless the House intervenes, from a just sense of its own duty not less than of the national honour, disasters yet greater than either of these, and probably irreparable, await the British empire.

"Our victories are perpetually held up as monuments of our eternal glory, and Maida, Corunna, Vimeira, and Talavera, are everlastingly referred to as the theme of undying congratulation. But what have any of these boasted triumphs done for the people of the country where they were won, or for the general issue of the war? Maida handed over the Neapolitans to the ten. der mercies of an irritated and cruel enemy; Corunna sacrificed Moore only to deliver over Gallicia to the Gallic

armies; Vimeira was immediately followed by the disgraceful convention of Cintra; and Talavera was at best but an exhibition of rash confidence and victorious temerity. Honours have been conferred upon Sir Arthur Wellesley, for whom and for his country it would have been much more honourable if he had never changed his name. His conduct in Spain seemed the result of infatuation. After defeating Soult, he recrossed the Douro to form a junction

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