Part 2

History and its philosophy are the true studies for a statesman in every age. In that educational point of view, we strongly suspect that the present ministerial cabinet is sorely deficient. The Whigs, as a body, are conversant with a very small space of history indeed. They are constantly jabbering about the fundamental principles of the constitution, which they date back no further than the advent of William of Orange. Their pet historian, and the ablest man among them, cannot make a single speech without dragging in, neck and heels, some vapidity about the Revolution Settlement of 1688; and they try to be profound in their criticisms upon the policy of Walpole and of Bute. Charles James Fox, of course, still continues to be their principal fetish, and they cling to antiquated party toasts with a superstition that would disgrace a Mussulman. But of the freer and bolder regions of history--of all that is great and elevating--of the numerous lessons to be gleaned, and the examples to be gathered from the grand old records of kingly and loyal England, or of the fall and fate of nations through the imbecility of their rulers, or the ambition of ignorant demagogues, they either know nothing practically, or they fail to acknowledge their importance. Whiggery is a small machine which works according to conventional rules of its own, and will not make allowance for the great springs of human action. A cabinet of Whigs is admirably adapted for the control and legislation of the sovereign state of Pumpfernickel, or some analogous German principality; but they never can assume their place at the helm of affairs in a great empire such as that of Britain, without landing the whole of us in dangerous difficulties, and sneaking off at the last hour under a humiliating sense of their own impotence and presumption.

The case is still worse when men like Mr Cobden come forward to try their hand either as pilots or as coadjutors. We presume that Mr Cobden, if the question were put to him, would candidly admit the narrowness of the range of his peculiar historical studies. We understand that he does not pretend to be a scholar, and that the amount, of the information which he possesses, however great that may be, is limited to modern facts and premises, upon which he usually reasons. A worse kind of education for a statesman, or for the leader of a popular movement, cannot be found than this. It was this kind of partial knowledge, unilluminated by the clear lucid light which bygone history alone can shed authoritatively upon passing events, which, in the recollection of many still alive, led to the dark catastrophe and horrors of the French Revolution. There is hardly one social change, hardly one political experiment now making, for which a prototype cannot be furnished from the pages of history. And of what possible use, it may be well asked, is history, if we are not to recur to it for a solution of the difficulties which may arise in our onward progress? Are we to gain no confidence, nor take any warning from the rise and decline of nations, not much less powerful than our own, whose checkered career and the causes of it are open to our view? Is the world behind us a blank, that we should go stumbling on at the instigation of every reckless adventurer, more culpable in his attempts to guide us, than the ship-captain who should presume to thread the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean without consulting the authoritative chart? Are we always to derive our information, not from what has been done and acted in the globe before--not from an attentive examination of men and their motives, and the countless springs of action which stir them, but from statistical tables and long columns of figures, compiled by rusty officials in their dens, and brought forth for the first time to be cited as overwhelming testimony by some premier who is meditating apostasy, or seeking some palliative to cover his shameful abandonment of a party? The features of the so-called statesmanship of the present day are essentially those of bureaucracy. A drudging arithmetical clerk, with whom a unit is every thing, and who would be nearly driven to despair by the discovery of a misquoted fraction, is a leading authority with our statesmen; and his vamped-up tables of export and import are considered sounder expositions of the destinies of the human race, than all the accumulated wisdom, learning, and experience which the annals of the world can afford.

The "tables," however, are now turned, and therefore we shall not say any more for the present about the blue-book and ledger system. Let us go back to Mr Cobden, whom we still find rather uselessly employed in protesting his total inability to command the clemency of the seasons. We have already shown, by papers published in this Magazine in December last and January of the present year, that our exports have lamentably fallen off, and that the balance of trade is against us. Such, we maintained, and we continue still to maintain, must be the effect of the new theories, especially under the restricted operation of the currency. We are glad to see that upon this latter point, at all events, we are supported by a large majority of the press. Mr Cobden, however, denies the evils of the currency; so that he must fall back upon something else to account for the unexpected defalcation.

Such is our position at home and abroad; and if we have been guilty of a digression, which we cannot altogether deny, we shall plead our motive in justification. When Mr Cobden comes forward with his views of foreign policy, with his ideas of the social progress of the universe, and with his notions as to the policy which hereafter may be adopted by great and ambitious foreign states,--when, after delivering his opinion upon these very weighty matters, he arrives at the inference, not only that we require no addition to our national defences, but that our present establishment of a standing army and navy is absurd, extravagant, and superfluous, we are entitled to inquire into the success with which his first experiment in legislative agitation has been crowned. Of the abundance of good things which he promised, how many have been realised, how many are like to emerge from the dark experimental gulf? If writhing colonies, diminished exports, want of employment, distress at home, enormous failures, monetary restriction, and vast depreciation of property, have followed in the wake of free-trade--if ministry are at present racking such brains as they possess to discover some means of keeping up the revenue to its ordinary level, and if they are forced to lay on a direct additional war-tax in times of the profoundest peace,--surely we shall not incur a charge of fickleness or ingratitude, if we should receive this new oracle of the free-trading Mokanna with some symptoms of dubiety and distrust.

The whole question arose thus. It appears that the Duke of Wellington, whose illustrious reputation and great services entitle him to be heard with the deepest and most reverential respect, has long entertained great uneasiness on account of the undefended state of this country in the case of a hostile invasion. That such an event is likely to take place, no one supposes or has said--that it possibly might take place, very few will venture to deny. The idea is not a new one; for within the range of the present century, preparations have been actually made for that purpose, and that whilst the wonderful power and facilities of steam-navigation were unknown. Fulton--we have seen men who knew him when he was a humble artisan in the West of Scotland--had, despairing of success at home, submitted his models to the French government, who, fortunately for us, did not then appreciate the merits of the invention. Three years afterwards, he started his first steamer on the Hudson in America. The power which our French neighbours had once so nearly within their grasp, at a time when it might have been used to the exceeding detriment of England, became generally known and adopted, and we need not speak of its progress. It has altogether changed the tactics of naval warfare. It can conquer the old difficulties of wind and tide, and it has immensely shortened the period of transit from the continental coast to our own. The security, therefore, of our insular barriers has been materially weakened, and thus far the possibility of an invasion from abroad has been increased. We are not now speaking of the _probability_, which is matter for subsequent consideration.

This open and admitted fact is the foundation of the whole argument of the Duke of Wellington. In the evening of a glorious life, the greater part of which has been spent in the active service of his country, the veteran soldier has thought it his duty to remind us, for our own guidance and that of our children, of the actual existing state of our national defences, which he deems to be insufficient. It is one of the last, but not, we think, the least important of the services which the venerable Duke has rendered to the nation, with whose proudest history his name will be eternally associated. We take it--or at least we ought to take it--from his lips, as a solemn warning; as the disinterested testimony of a man alike pre-eminent in war and in council; as the deliberate opinion of the GREAT PACIFICATOR OF EUROPE. For notwithstanding the irreverent, mean, and scurrilous taunts of the Manchester gang of demagogues, it is undeniable that the Great Duke has been the chief instrument in procuring for us the blessing of that peace which for two and thirty years we have enjoyed. It was his conquest at Waterloo which hushed the world. The tranquillity of Europe was the stake for which he fought, and he nobly won it. And now, when, at the last hour, this illustrious man comes forward to offer us his advice, and to warn us against the folly of trusting too implicitly to the continuance of that tranquillity, is it wise that we should scorn his counsel?

And what is the proposal which has excited such wrath, and so sorely roused the choler of the bilious Cobden? Simply this--that the British nation should at all times maintain at home a military force sufficient to repel an invasion, should such be attempted, from our shores. The Duke believes and maintains that we cannot now, as formerly, rely solely and implicitly upon our navy for defence, but that, in the event of a war, we must provide against the contingency of an enemy's landing. Our arsenals, he thinks, and our dockyards, should be supported by a military force, and at least we ought to exhibit such a front as will hold out no temptation to a hostile attempt. These are not aggressive, but precautionary measures; and without them, according to the Duke, we cannot consider ourselves secure.

Such are the proposals which Cobden and his clique--we are sorry to observe a gentleman like Sir William Molesworth among them--are prepared to resist to the last. They want no defences at all. They are opposed to any augmentation of the army. They would rather do without it, or reduce the establishment so as to make the national saving equivalent to the diminished amount of revenue consequent upon their commercial experiments. They look upon free-trade as a universal panacea which is to cure all national and social ailments, and to remedy every grievance. War is to be no more--territorial aggressions unknown--and the advent of the millennium is to be typified by an unbounded exportation of calico!

These are the views which have been lately propounded at Manchester, and the parties are therefore at issue. Cobden has matched himself against Wellington, and Quaker Bright has volunteered to be his bottle-holder. We really wish that it had been permitted us to approach the argument without mingling with it any asperity. But this is now totally out of the question. The disgusting and vulgar language which Mr Cobden has thought fit to use towards the greatest historical character of the age--the low-minded scurrility which pervades the whole of his egotistical discourse,--put him beyond the pale of conventional courtesy, or even of dignified rebuke. The man who could stand up in his place--no matter what audience was before him--stigmatise the Duke of Wellington as being in his old age a whetter and fomenter of discord, and finally insinuate _dotage_ as the only intelligible excuse, deserves, if there is a spark of national feeling left, to be publicly pilloried throughout Britain. "Would it not," says this disloyal prater, "have been a better employment for him to have been _preaching forgiveness for_, and oblivion of the past, than in reviving the recollection of Toulon, Paris, and Waterloo?" Forgiveness! and for what? For having vindicated the rights of the nations, terminated the insatiable career of Napoleon's rapine, and restored to us that peace which he is still desirous to preserve by maintaining Britain invulnerable, secure, and free!

But let us pass from a matter so deeply discreditable both to the speaker, and to the audience that applauded his sentiments. Meanly as we think of the latter, we are yet to believe that the next morning brought to many some feelings of compunction and of shame. Not so the former, who, wrapped up in the panoply of his own ridiculous conceit, a would-be Gracchus, must remain a Thersites for ever.

Irrespective of the purse argument, which, as a matter of course, is the chief motive of these gentry, the free-traders attempt to brand the Duke of Wellington with a charge of attempting to raise a hostile feeling between this country and the continental states. The accusation is as false as it is frivolous. The attitude of Britain is not, and never will be, aggressive. She is at this moment in the proud position of the mighty mediator of Europe; and it is to her strong right arm, and not to her powers of producing calico, that she owes that ascendency. Our interest clearly and incontestibly is to maintain peace, but that we cannot hope to maintain, if we abandon the power to enforce it. Among nations as among individuals, the weak cannot hope to prosper in active competition with the strong--nay, they are even in a worse position, because the law will protect individuals, whilst to nations there exists no common Court of Appeal. If we are content to renounce our position, and to give up our foreign possessions--a consummation which the free-trade theorists appear abundantly to desire--if we are to confine ourselves simply to our insular boundaries, and advertise as the workshop of the world--then, indeed, we shall surrender our supremacy, and with it the hope of maintaining peace. Can these men read no lessons from history? Does the sight of what is daily acting around them justify their anticipations of a millennium? What is the real state of the fact? Russia, having absorbed Poland, is now engaged in a territorial war with the Circassians, upon which she has already expended an enormous amount of treasure and of men; and she is prepared for a double sacrifice, if by such means she can gain possession of the passes which are the keys to southern Asia. Austria is hanging upon the skirts of Italy, concentrating her forces upon the frontier, and menacing an immediate invasion. Very lamb-like and pacific has been the conduct of America to Mexico. As for the French, whom Cobden eulogises as the most "affectionate and domesticated race on the face of the earth"--did the man ever hear of the Revolution?--they are notoriously the most aggressive of all the European nations. Did domestic feelings excite them to the conquest of Algeria? Did affection lead them to Tahiti? Was it a mania for free-trade that brought about the Montpensier marriage? Really it is difficult to know for which palm, that of ignorance or effrontery, this Manchester manufacturer is contending. Has he forgot the Joinville letter, which was hailed with such rapture on the other side of the Channel? Was Paris fortified without a purpose? Is he blind to the fact that the peace of Europe at this moment depends upon the life of a man now in his seventy-fifth year? We maintain that there never was a period, at least within our recollection, when the maintenance of general tranquillity throughout Europe was more precarious. And yet, this is the very moment which Mr Cobden selects for a crusade, or rather a tirade, against our military establishments!

Our feelings are any thing but those of dislike towards the "affectionate and domesticated" French. We admire their genius, and read their novels,--and we have a peculiar affection for their wine. In one point alone we agree with Mr Cobden. We still retain the ancient Caledonian predilection for claret in competition with port, and we should be sorry to be deprived of champagne. Still sorrier should we be to lose our annual spring trip to Paris; to be banished from the Boulevards and the Palais Royal, and to enjoy only in memory those delicious dinners at the Rocher de Cancale. We have no wish to run the risk of a compulsory detention at Verdun. Nay, we shall go further, and apprise Mr Cobden, that had our lot been cast a few centuries back, we should in all probability have been fervent maintainers of the ancient bond of alliance between King Achaius of Scotland and the Emperor Charlemagne; and nothing would have given us greater pleasure than to have visited Manchester along with a few thousand lads who swore by Saint Andrew, whilst the partisans of Denis were amusing themselves in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth. But times have changed. We have contracted an alliance with the nation of which Mr Cobden is so creditable a representative; and upon the whole, we are not altogether dissatisfied with the arrangement. We can now look upon the French with an eye undimmed by affection; and we must confess that we have very little, if any, faith in that marvellous change of their character which is sworn to by the Manchester spouters. They may be very excellent fellows, but we would rather not trust them with our keys. The tone and temper of a nation do not alter quite so rapidly as Mr Cobden seems to suppose. The history of Algeria is a very significant hint that the old ideas of the French on the score of conquest are not yet wholly obliterated; and we should rather imagine that they have not quite forgotten their pristine appetite for plunder. They deserve, however, considerable credit for the dexterous manner in which they have thrown dust into the eyes of Mr Cobden. You would think, to hear the man, that he is an inoculated Frenchman. Presume to criticise their character, and his scream is like that of a railway engine. Just hint that you consider them unscrupulous, and our calico-printer overboils "with horror and shame and indignation." We have no doubt that he considers it a great pity that history cannot be annihilated--that is, supposing he has ever condescended to notice any thing so trivial as history. Will he not favour the world with a new version of the French Revolution? We are anxious to hear his grounds for supposing the French to be an "affectionate and domestic people;" and since we are, to fraternise with them altogether, it would be comfortable to know our brethren as they really are. We want to have a true account of the Noyades. Were these really wholesale drownings, or a mere ebullition of national fun? Doubtless, there is much humour--though we have not yet been able to see it--in the clanking of the guillotine; and the expeditions to Moscow and Madrid, with their accompanying tales of rapine and butchery, may possibly be demonstrated by Mr Cobden as instances of a practical joke. Davoust, as the Hamburgians know, was a fine fellow; and so, upon examination, may prove Robespierre and Marat. Perhaps, too, he will come down a little later, and tell us the particulars of the gallant and gentleman-like behaviour of M. Dupetit-Thouars towards Queen Pomare. Or will he undertake to prove that Abd-el-Kader is an infamous scoundrel, utterly beyond the pale or security of national faith and of plighted honour?

It is plain, either that Mr Cobden has been egregiously humbugged by the acute foreigners, or that he has subsided into a state of calm, settled, and imperturbable idiocy. It is too cruel in Bright to parade in such a way his former friend and master, and to quote from his private correspondence. We wonder what is Sir Robert Peel's present opinion of the man whom he chose to bespatter with his praise, and for whose sake he was content to forfeit the elaborate reputation of a life-time. But bad as Cobden may be, he is fairly surpassed in Gallic enthusiasm by the notorious George Thompson, whose patriotism may be gathered from the tone of the following paragraph:--"Why, what were the toasts given at the sixty reform banquets of France? This has been one of their toasts at least, 'Fraternity, liberty, equality.' Let us echo from these shores the shouts that have been raised there, and I am sorry to say, stifled, so far as Paris is concerned, for the banquet did not come off there. Let us send back the echo, fraternity, liberty, equality!" And this pestilential raving has been applauded to the echo in Manchester.

Let us have peace with the French by all means, and with all the world beside; but let us not fall into the despicable and stupid blunder of supposing that human passion and human prejudice, the lust for power, and the cravings of ambition, can ever be eradicated by any system of commercial arrangement. Britain is naturally an object of envy to all the continental states. It is her strength and position which have hitherto maintained the balance of power--and of that the European states are fully and painfully aware. Every step which can tend to weaken the fidelity of her colonies, is regarded with intense interest abroad, and more especially in France. The people of that country envy us for our wealth, and dislike us for our power; and war with Britain, could the French afford it, would at any time find a host of advocates. We are not believers in the probability of such an event, if we keep ourselves reasonably prepared; but the very first relaxation upon our part would inevitably tend to accelerate it. It is quite possible that France may yet have to undergo another dynastic convulsion. The death of Louis Philippe may be the signal for intestine disorder. The Count of Paris is a mere boy, and popularity is not on the side of his uncle and guardian. A powerful party still exists, acknowledging no king save the rightful heir of St Louis; and the fanatical republican section is still strong and virulent. These are things which it would be imprudent to disregard, and of which no man living can venture to predict the result. The death of the Queen of Spain would, according to all appearances, give rise to a rupture with France, and possibly test, within a shorter period than we could have believed, the sufficiency of our national defences. There is at this moment every reason why our real strength and power should be made apparent to the world, and our weakness, where it does exist, immediately remedied and repaired.

Had the Duke of Wellington proposed, like Friar Bacon in Greene's old play,

"To girt fair England with a wall of brass,"

the outcry could not have been greater. An iron wall might perhaps have been rather popular in the mining districts. But his Grace proposes no such thing. He only suggests the propriety of a small augmentation of the regular forces at home, the strengthening of our neglected fortifications, and the gradual reimbodiment of the militia. It is for the British nation, or rather its representatives, to adopt or reject the proposal. Now, it is worth while that we should keep in mind what is our actual disposable force at present.