of a million of lives during the Revolution, excited neither indignation nor commiseration in the Jacobin majority in France. It was universally regarded by them as a measure equally expedient, justifiable, and necessary. The entire abandonment at once of our public faith and national policy, in like manner, during the fervor of political passions in this country, some years ago, in relation both to Spain and the Netherlands; the nourishing a frightful civil war for years together on the banks of the Ebro; the dispossessing a sovereign we were pledged as a nation to maintain on the throne of Spain, excited no general feeling, either of pity or indignation, in Great Britain. It was thought to be quite natural and proper that we should supplant legitimate kings by revolutionary queens in every country around us. Examples of this sort are fitted to awaken at once feelings of charity and distrust in our breasts-charity to others, distrust of ourselves. They may teach us to view with a lenient, if not a forgiving eye, the aberrations of those nations which have yielded to the force of those passions under which, with so many more means of resistance, our own understandings have so violently reeled; and to examine anxiously whether many of the public measures which at the time are the subject of the most general approbation in Great Britain, are not in reality as unjust, and will not be condemned by posterity as unanimously, as the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or any other of the most atrocious acts by which the pages of history are stained.

The remarkable analogy must strike even the most superficial observer, between the position of the Tories,

35. Analogy between the situation of the

War of the

Succession,

that of the

and the policy which they adopted during the conTories in the test of the Succession, and that which the Whigs occupied, and their conduct during the war of the and Whigs in Revolution. On both occasions, the opposition was determinedly set against a war, which a ministry in power was carrying on with vigor and success against a preponderating power in France, that threatened, and had wellnigh overturned, the independence of all the adjoining

Revolution.

states in Europe. In both, the contest was one of life or death for the liberties and even the existence of England; and yet the opposition in both exerted their whole influence and abilities to mar its progress and impede its success. In both, a great and victorious English general headed the forces of the alliance; and in both, for a series of years, his successes were underrated, his achievements vilified, his efforts thwarted, by the opposition in the very country whose glory he was daily augmenting, and securely establishing on a more durable foundation. In both, Great Britain was combating a power which had proved itself to be the deadliest enemy to real freedom, for it is hard to say whether Louis XIV.'s persecution of the Protestants, or the atrocities of the Convention at Paris a century after, inflicted the cruelest wounds on the cause of liberty. In both, the league of the allies, though originally springing out of this unbearable oppression, had come to hinge mainly on the necessity of preventing the political power of France being extended over Spain. In both, the chief seats of war for the English and French armies were Spain and the Low Countries; and in both, the decisive blows were at length struck on the Flemish plains.

36. Extraordinary

coincidence in

the crisis of the

two contests.

And the crisis in both brings the parallel still closer, and to a most singular, and some may think almost providential, coincidence; for in May, 1712, the Tories consummated the war on which they had so long been engaged, by effecting the separation of England from the alliance, when the iron barrier of France was at last effectually broken through, and nothing remained to prevent Marlborough and Eugene from marching in triumph to Paris; and in May, 1812, just a hundred years after, the Whigs had the means put into their hands of effecting their long-desired pacification with France, by the prince regent sending for their leaders to form a ministry on the expiry of the year of restriction enforced on him by act of Parliament, on his assuming the power of king. If the Whigs had succeeded in forming a government at that period, if the apparently trivial dispute

37.

Real causes of

conduct of the

opposite par

ties on these occasions.

about the household appointments had not restored their opponents to power, there can be no doubt that a peace, similar to that of Utrecht, would have stopped the war for a time, and bequeathed its dangers and its burdens to another, perhaps the present age. And this was on the eve of the Salamanca campaign, at the opening of the Moscow expedition !* It must appear, at first sight, not a little extraordinary, that conduct so precisely similar, and in both cases so this identity of diametrically at variance with the real interests of the country, should in this manner have been alternately pursued by the two great parties whose contests have for nearly two hundred years so entirely engrossed English domestic history. But the marvel ceases when their internal political situation is considered. In both cases, the opposition who resisted the war and strove to arrest its progress, which was conducted with glory and success by their opponents, had recently before been dispossessed of power. The Tories, by the Revolution of 1688, had been so completely driven from the helm, that, as the event proved, they did not recover their ground for seventy years, and a change of dynasty at the time could alone secure them in it. The Whigs had, by the ministerial revolutions of 1784, been, after the most strenuous efforts on their part, so effectually dispossessed of power, that they had no prospect of recovering it but by the national calamity of a failure in the war in which their antagonists were engaged. Thus, by a singular combination of circumstances, the two parties, at the interval of a century from each other, stood in precisely the same situation, so far as the foreign war and its reactions upon their domestic prospects was concerned. The interests of both were identified with the misfortunes of their country and the triumphs of

* "The negotiation between the prince regent and the Whigs was broken off on the 6th of June, 1812. On the 13th of the same month Wellington crossed the Portuguese frontier and commenced the Salamanca campaign, while on the 23d Napoleon passed the Niemen, and periled his crown and his life on the precarious issue of a Russian invasion."-ALISON's Europe, chap. Ixiv., § 45.

its enemies.

Their wishes, as is generally the case, followed in the same direction. The secret inclinations of the Tories, in the War of the Succession, were with the court of St. Germain's, because its restoration to royalty would at once have replaced them at the helm; the secret wishes of the Whigs, in the war of the Revolution, were with the tricolor flag, because its triumphs would at once have ruined the Tories, and restored them to the much-coveted possession of power. In both cases the selfish prevailed over the generous, the party over the patriotic, feelings of our nature. In both the party in opposition were false to their country, but true, as they thought, at least to themselves. And both have obtained their just punishment by receiving the merited condemnation. of succeeding times.

38. Excuses which

existed for the policy of the Toof Utrecht

ries at the Trea

ty

from the dread of Spain.

Though the event, however, has decisively proved that Bo lingbroke and Oxford judged wrong in detaching England from the Grand Alliance in 1712, and that their measures, by securing to France the family compact with the Spanish Bourbons, brought the country to the brink of ruin in 1782, yet it must be admitted, in their vindication, that plausible arguments were not wanting to justify the unpatriotic course which they adopted. Great as was the power of France in the time of Louis XIV., it was comparatively of recent growth. Serious as had been the perils of the nation from his ambition, it had been placed in yet greater danger by the enterprises of the Spanish monarchy. The terrors of the Armada were yet fresh in the minds of the people; the monarchy of Charles V. was the nearest approach to universal dominion which had been made since the days of Charlemagne. If the Whigs had succeeded in making Louis XIV. accept the terms offered to him by the allies at Gertruydenberg in 1709, which they were within a hair-breadth of doing, the monarchy of Charles V. was reconstructed in favor of the Emperor of Germany, with an apparently considerable accession of power. The whole present dominions of Austria in Germany and Lombardy, Na

ples and Sicily, Flanders, Spain, and South America, would have constituted the hereditary dominions of a power to which the imperial crown would, as a matter of course, have come to be permanently united.

The Tories, however, in the time of Queen Anne, were too

Bolingbroke's

ruined state

monarchy at

39. clear-sighted not to see that the danger from the picture of the Spanish monarchy, great as it had been a century of the Spanish before, had passed away before their time, and that this period. France was the power by which the independence of England was really threatened. If circumstances had rendered the junction of the Spanish dominions to one or other unavoidable, it was evidently for the interest of Great Britain that it should be united to the distant and inland territories of the house of Austria, destitute of fleets and harbors, and constantly engrossed with wars with the Turks, rather than to the great and flourishing monarchy of France, with an extensive sea-coast, and a navy rivaling our own, in close vicinity, and actuated by a jealousy of England of many centuries' standing. Bolingbroke has shown that he perceived these obvious truths as clearly as any man, and consequently that the terrors expressed by the Tories on occasion of the peace of Utrecht, at the prospect of reconstructing the empire of Charles V., were hypocritical, and had been got up to conceal objects fundamentally different. "Philip II.,” says he, “left his successors a ruined monarchy. He left them something worse; he left them his example and his principles of government, founded in ambition, pride, ignorance, bigotry, and all the pedantry of state. The war in the Low Countries cost him, by his own confession, five hundred and sixty-four millions, a prodigious sum, in whatever specie he reckoned. At home, there was much form, but no good order, no economy or wisdom of policy in the state. The Church continued to devour its resources; and that monster, the Inquisition, to dispeople the country, even more than perpetual war, and all the numerous colonies that Spain had sent out to the West Indies; for Philip III. drove more than nine hundred thousand Moris