in or from without, which shall be made in that power which has sworn our destruction, and which, till she is destroyed herself, will never cease in her endeavours to accomplish it. And what must be the counsels, and what the situation of this country, if we are voluntarily to place ourselves in a situation, in which it shall be impossible for us to co operate to the producing any such change, or the availing ourselves of it, if it should happen by other means? If such is our situation, or such are our ideas, there is no difficulty in predicting that we must ultimately perish In every view, therefore, either of what is to be looked to her after, or is necessary in the present moment, I must condemn a measure, of which both the immediate effect, and final tendency, is to deprive the country of a regular army, that is to say, of the best means for home defence, and of the only means of effectual and finally successful war.-And here it may not be amiss to advert to another measure of less extent, but of the same general character, and which as far as it goes, is a revival of that system unhappily adopted in the beginning of the last war, and of the effects of which the army has not yet recovered; namely, that of raising men for rank. Notwithstanding all the modifications and temperaments introduced into it by the Honourable Gentleman, the effects of it, as far as the measure extends, will be much the same as in the former instance. No prohibitions will ever restrain officers placed in those circumstances, from giving more than the regulated bounty. In fact, it is notorious that they do give more, the effect of the measure therefore, in this respect, is only to add to the competition against the army already subsisting, and to raise the rate of bounty against the other recruiting parties; against the ordinary recruiting, you may say, of the same regiment. So that it can hardly be considered as adding a man to the army.-On the other hand, if money is not to be employed in raising these men, money I mean beyond the rate of bounty allowed by the regulation, then what are you to rely upon?Upon a hope ten times more fatal in the accomplishment of it, in my opinion, than any effect likely to result from the increase of the rate of bounty; namely, that a certain number of British officers forgetting that delicacy of sentiment, and nice sense of honour, which so peculiarly marks the character of officers in our service, and makes them what they are, will become, what is called, able recruiters, that is to say, men versed and expert in the noble art of crimping, one of the most degrading employ ments, and most inconsistent with all up right and liberal feelings, that can well be conceived. Such is the state of the measures offered to us at last by his Majesty's government, in this most awful crisis of our affairs, with a view of averting the dreadful dangers with which we have to struggle. I have stated already the changes which I should wish to see introduced into these measures, and the course which I would pursue with respect to those parts of general defence of which we have here been treating. If a body of men must be raised by ballot, of which I do not care to give a decisive opinion, let the numbers be confined to the mere men ballotted, and let the sums paid as penalties for exemption be laid out not for completing these corps, but for augmenting the recruiting fund for the service of the army.-Let the same be done for the Militia universally. If government have a mind to procure substitutes, in any instance, for the old Militia, let it take the providing these substitutes into its own hands, so as to see that no increase be thence made to what it should fix for the rate of bounty.-Let the condition of service in the army be changed so as to make the engagement for term of years instead of for life, with such increasing advantages held out, at the close of succeeding periods, (as well by certain privileges to be then enjoyed, as by bounties, and increase of pension,) as might be most likely to ensure a continuance of the service of the men once engaged. To these changes should be added a total abolition of drafting, not silently introduced, and adopted merely in practice, but so declared before-hand, as that its benefits might be felt in the recruiting. In general, in this as in many other regula. tions that might be proposed, the maintaining, or rather the creating, an army would be my object, conceiving that even for purposes of mere defence, a small portion of truly regular troops, in conjunction with the undisciplined efforts of the country, may be set in balance against a very large propor tion of troops imperfectly formed. Thus far I have been considering only, what may be called the embodied force of the country. But will this force, increase it, constitute it, how you will, be sufficient? And must not a new and larger fund be resorted to, namely, that which will embrace all the strength, energy, zeal, talents, faculties mental and corporeal, of the country? If we think that we can be protected by any of the ordinary means of war, by trusting our defence to men, dressed as soldiers, and hired or compelled to defend us, bating the chances, by sea or otherwise, that may interpose to defeat the enemy's projects in the first instance, we are little less than undone. This embodied force, be it good or bad, can go but a very little way. You cannot have it, if you wait to the last moiment; to call it forth beforehand, to the necessary amount, would be an evil which the state of society in this country could never endure. This evil will be felt to a fearful extent in the present measure; without, at the same time, any adequate advantage being derived from it. The whole, indeed, of this measure is of that sort of which the examples are so numerous, and which are calculated more for show than use. We hear often of parliamentary grounds, and in cases where parliamentary grounds would seem to be something distinct from grounds of reason and common sense. In the same manner we meet occasionally with what may be called parliamentary measures: that is to say, measures which in skilful bands will make an imposing figure in a statement, particularly when addressed to persons wholly unconversant with the subject; but will never pass upon experienced and intelligent men, and will be found utterly to fail in practice: a sort of show-goods, such as will appear to sufficient advantage in a shop window, but will never bear the eye of a dealer, and will be found wholly unfit for wear. At all events, you must have recourse to other, and more extensive means. You must prepare the country: you must put the country in a situation in which its patriotic zeal, its native courage, its various and abundant energies may have a way to operate and produce their natural effects. all; a ribband, or even a handkerchief round the arm, to distinguish those, who were receiving this instruction, from the crowd that might occasionally accompany them, is all that would be necessary. Those essential parts of military training, as they seem to be thought, a fife and a drum, the marching in rank and in file, the wheeling backwards, the eyes right and eyes left, whatever may be their value on other occasions, -a point that I do not presume to meddle with-must here, however reluctantly, be given up. Firing at a mark; learning, indeed, to fire at all, which, (thanks to the game laws) few of our peasantry are acquainted with; some instruction in the manner of cleaning arms; much instruction in the methods of lining hedges, firing from behind trees, retiring upon call, and resuming a new sta in; these are all the heads of discipline to which I should propose them to be exercised. It is not, indeed, very well ascertained what proportion these may bear (a very deficient one, no doubt,) to the whole of what is required of soldiers; nor how far much of that which use and prejudice has taught us to consider as essential, might be dispensed with, though possibly not without some disadvantage, even in regular armies. It is not very clear, that troops in the Duke of Marlborough's time, were required in marching to move all of them the same leg at once. Much of the modern practice was introduced under the authority of the great King of Prussia, who adapted his system to his own mode of warfare,-the warfare of large armies in open countries, and might himself possibly be aware, that many of its rules, though upon the whole desirable, were not of that importance which his lessinformed imitators have since ascribed to them. The French, whose authority at this time it is not for Europe to dispute, have changed back much of what was then introduced, and have got nearer in some respects to what was the old practice, but more nearly perhaps to what was the practice in the late American war and though with them the eternal difference between trained and untrained; between regular and irregular; (what are called irregular being with them perfectly regular troops in their own kind) between veteran and disciplined soldiers and hasty levies, is perfectly understood; yet the mode of warfare introduced by them countenances much more than heretofore, the utility of such armed and partially instruct : The general plan, which presents itself to me for that purpose, and on which a thousand others might be engrafted, according as circumstances varied, or future views developed themselves, would be instantly to distribute the country, or such parts of it as you wished immediately to prepare (for one merit, at least, of this plan is, that you may take as much or as little of it as you please) into small divisions of two or three contiguous parishes each, according to the population, stationing an officer in each, with a small deposit of arms and ammuni tion, and whose office it should be, in concert with all the zeal, intelligence, and influence which he might find in the neighbourhood, to train those who should voluntarily offer themselves, to such parts of military training as they would be alone capable of, and as are, after all, by far the most impor-ed bodies, as that which I have presumed tant. It would never enter into my idea, to introduce into bands of this sort any of the foppery of dress, or any distinctive dress at to recommend. The measure is, at least, good as far as it goes. It draws no man from his home; it puts no man in a state of painful constraint; it stops no man in his business, so as to leave his family to distress or become a charge upon the public. It has the further merit of not interfering with any thing else, so as to prevent any man from entering the army, or navy, or militia, or serving the state in any other way. Expense I would have none. The pay of the officer, the price of the powder consumed, the hire of the store-house for depositing the arms in cases where the parish church could not be made to serve the purpose, with such an allowance to the men, as was a mere equivalent for their lost time, these would be the whole, or nearly the whole, of the expenses incident to the plan, which certainly could not be thought objectionable on that score. But So much as to its negative merits. As to its advantages, it provides for a distribution of arms whenever the time shall come; and it prepares the people in a certain degree for the use of them. It fills the country with powder and ball: and it instructs those in whose custody they are placed, to what hands, when the emergency shall call for it, they may be entrusted to the greatest advantage and with most safety. The officer, aided by the leading gentlemen, by the clergyman, by the principal yeomen and others, and having continued intercourse with the lower orders, will soon be able to form a tolerable judgment of those on whom he may rely, upon such an occasion, and those, who from feebleness or otherwise are less worthy of such confidence. the greatest, possibly, of all the advantages which I should be inclined to hope from this plan is, that most important of all preparations, the preparation of the mind. It seems to be almost the only way, (I must think the most effectual) in which they will be thoroughly impressed with a conviction of the danger. The present measure will, I confess, prove a powerful instructor as far as inconvenience goes: but, that is, at least, not the pleasantest way of conveying instruction. But the present measure will never instruct the people in this, that it must be on their own exertions, that they must depend for salvation. One main objection to the measure is, that its tendency is the direct reverse. In the other way, both a sense of the danger, and a knowledge of the means necessary to be employed against it, will be carried into every farm-house and every cottage. will be the conversation of the village green, of the church porch, and what is not the least, perhaps, of the ale-house. Men will be turning their thoughts to what they It can do upon the occasion, will be calling up the memory of former exploits, will be counting upon their newly acquired means and knowledge, and above all will be familiarizing their minds to the object. It is not to be told how much of military knowledge (which is nothing more than the application of common sense to situations, new indeed, but soon capable of being comprehended,) will spring up under this cultivation, in situations, where apparently it was to be least expected. An officer stationed in this way, if only by promoting military conversation, will become a source of instruction by no means to be despised. Every day of exercise or walk into the fields will be a sort of clinical lecture. If the officer be an intelligent man, and has seen service, he will soon find himself surrounded by people, who will have acquired under his instructions reasonably good military ideas, and have qualified themselves, should the occasion arise, to render him very useful assis tance. This sort of armed force, not confined, like the volunteers hitherto raised, to small troops in towns, and who (without disparagement be it spoken,) consist for the most part of persons, who from bodily force, habits, and situation of life, cannot generally be expected to support the fatigues of military service. This sort of armed force, coextensive with the active population of the country, though it cannot of itself stop the march of an army, must produce an immense effect, aided by troops of yeomanry, whose utility will be very great, in co-operation with such resistance as we expect from forces of a different description. When we talk of the difference to armies acting in a friendly or a hostile country, we certainly do not suppose that difference to be less, because the hostile country happens to be prepared and armed. But every preparation of this sort has hitherto, by his Majesty's ministers, been completely neglected. We are, for aught we know, within two months of invasion, and the measure now just brought forth, is the only measure except the calling out the Militia, which they appear to have thought of. But they do, it seems, immense things in secret. True dignity shows itself in calm! Why, Sir, what these measures can be, of which the country knows nothing, it is not very easy to comprehend; and therefore one a little distrusts the nature of this calm. There are different sorts of calm. There is the calm of confident and complacent hope, and the calm of despair. The calm of men, who having passed the first agitation of danger, have settled their minds to a determined resistance to it; and the calm of those, who are only tranquil, because, from ignorance or insensibility, they are wholly incredulous of its approach. I wish the Hon. Gentlemen's calm may not be that of a wretched lodger, who, hearing a noise below, instead of manfully getting up to resist the robbers, only hides his head in the bed clothes, and hopes they may go off with their other booty without coming into his apartment. Their secrecy too is altogether as whimsical an idea. They observe, I suppose, that Buonaparté is very secret; and judging him, as they well may, to be a great Captain, they conceive, by imitating his secrecy, that they shall appear to be great Captains themselves. But they forget the difference between attack and defence. A man who means to surprise his enemy does very right to keep his intentions secret; but it is not altogether so proper on the part of him who means only not to be surprised. An officer who was about to surprise a post, by a night attack suppose, would do very well not to tell his soldiers, whither he was leading them; but it would be odd, if the officer on the other side was to say to the next in command, 'I have intelligence that we shall be attacked to night; but remember this is only for yourself. Don't say a word to the guard; secrecy is the very soul of military operations. There is another rather material difference, that Buonaparté has nothing to do but to issue his orders with a certainty that they will be punctually obeyed, whether the army like them or not, whether they are called upon to execute them at a longer or shorter notice, or whether they have any conception or not of the general purpose which they are meant to answer.But the army, here to be applied to, is the people of Great Britain, who, besides that, they may debate a little upon the orders which they receive, must act in a great degree from their own impulse and discretion, and who will never be brought to act at all, if they themselves are not previously made sensible of the danger.-I, for one, will not pay them so bad a compliment as to suppose that they are not fit to be trusted with this secret. I disclaim the notion, I renounce as impious and heretical' that damnable doctrine,' that to blind the people as to their true situation, to conceal from them the reality of the danger, is the only way to keep up their courage. If this is really their state, then is the country in a deplorable way indeed but changed as the people of this country are, by a thousand causes, and under the influence of a sort of language, and policy which has prevailed for so many years, I will never believe, that they must be lulled into a false security, be exposed to all the dreadful dangers of a surprise, (the effects of which no man can calculate,) because, to show their danger would be to dismay them. How do we combine this with all the vaunting and high-flown compli ments, which we are for ever paying them? Are they only brave, when they believe there is no danger? I reject the imputation. Their safety depends upon their exertions; and their exertions must be stimulated, as I am confident they will be stimulated, by a sense of their danger. In addition to those exertions which the people themselves must make, and on which must rest our chief hopes, there is much that ministers themselves ought to be diligently employed about, but to which I much suspect no attention has been given. Every officer of note and character in the country ought to be called upon for his opinion: not an opinion given in conversation, and with an obliging acquiesence, perhaps, to the presumed notions or wishes of the person he is talking to, but such as must stand in evidence against him, and on which his military judgment and credit will be at stake. Innumerable measures of precaution are likewise necessary, and which would not be the less useful, because they would be attended with no expense or distress to the country. I do not object to the present measure on account of the expense or inconvenience which attend it, great as they will be. Whatever is necessary must be done, let the hardship be what it will. But I beg that we may not invert the proposition, as many are apt to do, and suppose that whatever is burthensome and oppressive, must therefore be efficacious. I suspect the present measure to be of that character: possibly in all its parts; but unquestionably I must object to it, in that part, which goes in the first instance, and finally, as I believe, to make it impossible for us to have an army. NAVAL. FROM THE LONDON GAZETTE. June 13.-LIEUT. ARCHBOLD, in the Eling off Cape Frehel, captured L'Espiegle priva teer, manned with 12 men and armed with small arms, 18 days from St. Maloes. June 14.-CAPT. OWEN, in the Immortali te, in company with the Jalour and Cruizer sloops, chased L'Inabordable, schooner, and Le Commode brig; each carrying 3 24-pounders and 1 8-pounder, on shore on the east part of Cape Blanc Nez, and after a heavy firing from them and the batteries, took possession of them. FOREIGN. Leghorn, June 1.-This city is declared in a state of siege by Gen. Murat, and all the English made prisoners of war. Hanover, June 7.-The greatest quiet prevails in this city in consequence of the good treatment the inhabitants have received from the French army. The Elbe and the Weser continue open to neutral vessels, and are only shut against the British. SUMMARY OF POLITICS. HANOVER.-The Moniteur of the 17th instant contains an article, in the shape of note on the English news, stating, that the council, to assist at which his Majesty came from Windsor on the 11th instant, was held on the subject of the convention between Gen. Mortier and the Hanoverian Regency. "An extraordinary courier," says the Moniteur, "carried this instrument for the sig"nature of the King of England, the First "Consul insisting upon that, previous to "ratifying it himself."-And this is proclaimed all over the world! This cup of humiliation (God send it may be the last!) this act by which his Majesty is compelled to sanction, under his own hand and seal, the most disgraceful capitulation that ever was consented to by any army or any government upon earth, he owes entirely to the "safe politicians," who made, and who defended the peace of Amiens.-The Moniteur has an article dated Hanover, 7th instant, which abounds in abuse, or, at least, in sarcasm, on his Majesty's sons. It is hardly credible, that this can have been the language of the Hanoverians; but, it must be confessed, that the shameful manner, in which their country was surrendered, would sanction a belief in any act of baseness on their part. It is true, indeed, that the Hanoverians were shamefully abandoned by the British ministers, who, it is positively asserted, despised all the advice that was offered them as to the Electorate, for the fate of which they said, even to the last moment, that they saw no cause of uneasiness! God send, that their administration may cost their Master no other part of his dominions! Let us hope, that the Addingtons will not be so careless about Richmond Park as they have been about Hanover! Their " family" is not quite so ancient as that of Brunswick, which after that of Bourbon is the most ancient in Europe. France was lost through the imbecillity and selfishness of its ministers much more than through any other means; Hanover has been lost from a similar cause; and, while that cause exists in England, what man that loves his country can be free from appretension?-At the time when the partition of Germany was going on, the English mi nistry seemed to rejoice at it. They said, in their hired prints, that it would prevent the return of war upon the Continent; and, we find, that, amongst all their lately conjured-up complaints, this does not make its appearance. They were, however, told, that Hanover, in case of another war, would instantly be seized on by the French: all that has now arrived was foreseen and foretold they turned a deaf ear to it: they retained their places: who, therefore, but their dupes are astonished at the event? And who is there weak enough to pity those dupes? FRENCH REMARKS ON THE BUDGET.The Moniteur has also some remarks on Mr. Addington's budget, which may not be altogether uninteresting to that worthy person and his supporters.-On the passage where the wise minister speaks of the necessity of preparing for an arduous and even a protracted war, the Moniteur says, "If "bis Britannic Majesty really intends to accomplish the object of the war; that is "to say, 1. to keep Malta; 2. to make "France submit to the new public law in"vented by England; 3. to make sure that "all the countries which the timid Mr. Ad"dington shall think necessary to provide "for the safety of Great Britain, shall be "instantly given up to her, the war will be "much longer than this honourable man "thinks, with all his fore-sight."-One of the principal objects of the war, as stated by the wise man, in his budget-speech, and as repeated by both him and the Secretary at War, in the debate of the 20th instant, is to convince Buonaparté, or, to use the phrase of those prudent ministers, the person at the head of the government of France; to convince this person, that "it is hopeless "for him to contend with our finances, and "that it is not in his power to affect us in "that respect (1)."-To which Buonaparté laconically replies: "Pay your Bank Notes "in gold and silver, and then I'll believe you, without your going to war."—lf this saucy sarcastic fellow were here, Mr. Addington and Abraham Newland would tell him another story. If he were to pre sent them a bank note of a hundred pounds, they would not, indeed, give him a hundred pounds in cash for it; but they would give him a hundred little notes; and, in order to convince him of their ability to pay in gold, were they not restrained by act of Parliament, they would show him (brough a glass case) a great number of wedges of that precious metal, which wedges are kept with (1) See Speech, Register, Vol. III. p. 912. |