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Buonaparte's Moniteur acknowledges that France has lost five hundred thousand men in the peninsula, during the present contest; and we may be well assured that the official paper of Napoleon does not overrate the loss of the French armies in Spain. The veteran troops of France are nearly all used up in combating with the "brigands," the "insurgents," and the new conscripts are merely beardless boys who perish in unnumbered heaps; by over-marching; by famine; by the knives of the Spanish women; by incessant harassing of the convoys and foraging parties; by deadly encounter in the open field. It is of importance in considering this question, to bear in mind that since the treaty of Vienna, in October, 1809, Buonaparte has had no other enemy on the continent of Europe with whom to contend, save the Spaniards and Portugueze, aided by the British bayonet. If his command of men and money; if his military resources be so all-sufficient as we are told; why does he send into the peninsula such numbers of tender striplings, if he can obtain a sufficient supply of men; why are those countries now, in December, 1810, in the third year of a war, which he boasted in his official bulletins should be utterly finished in three months, more formidable than ever?

But, say the many who admire or fear the Corsican, it is not from France alone that Napoleon levies his armies; his conscription creates him troops from the whole population of continental Europe; from a hundred and twenty millions of human beings; and therefore he cannot fail of speedily subduing the feeble resistance of a few Spaniards and Portugueze. But Buonaparte has not the whole population of continental Europe from which to recruit his exhausted armies; neither Austria nor Russia is yet so suf ficiently humbled as to permit their subjects to be conscribed. The conscription indeed extends to France, to Holland, to Italy, to Switzerland, to

Westphalia, and to most, perhaps to all the petty dominions of the kings and the kinglings of the Rhenish Confederation. But the effective, the military population of Italy, of Holland, and of France, is already drained to the very dregs; and the Germans and Swiss who are driven over the Pyrenees into the peninsula, to do the work of blood there, are incessantly deserting in companies, in battalions, in regiments, in whole brigades, to the allied armies. Every fresh arrival from Europe confirms the truth of this statement; Lord Wellington, in his last dispatch, calculates the desertions from Massena's army to his own at an average of five hundred a week; and a letter from Gibraltar of so late a date as 29th September, 1810, says, that within a few months upwards of five thousand German deserters from the French in Spain enlisted for the British army, and passed through Gibraltar; and that twenty-one officers and seven hundred men had come over from the French to the Spaniards at Carthagena in one night; and indeed, all the accounts from Spain, state the desertions of the German and Swiss troops from the French armies to be most numerous and frequent.

What then is the result? what, but that the French population alone, (for I count nothing upon the levies derived from the Italians and Dutch), is to vanquish the British, Spanish, and Portugueze armies, high in hope, flushed with victory, animated with confidence, and inflamed with just indignation at the atrocity of the invader? Now Mr. Walsh himself allows in a note to pp. 193-4, of his "Letter," &c. that "the military population of France is greatly diminished;" if so, how is Buonaparte to subdue the peninsula? It is true that Mr. Walsh also states, in the note above referred to, that “the numerical" population of Francé is on the increase. Suppose this to be the fact; yet would it not aid Napoleon in his schemes of immediate and rapid conquest; because he must fight his

battles with the military not with the numerical part of his population; and he cannot afford to wait so many years of repose and peace as will be necessary to repair the gaps in his military population, by ripening the male part of his numerical population into manhood; not to mention that the conscription-system itself renders it absolutely impossible to fill up the breaches in the military population; because it sweeps away every year all the boys of France as soon as they reach the age of sixteen. The main reasons adduced by Mr. Walsh for supposing that the numerical population of France is on the increase, are, the great quantity of early marriages, and the superabundance of bastardy in the Great Nation. But neither bastards nor legitimate children in France, or elsewhere, can live without food; and all the preceding statements in' Mr. Walsh's book incontestibly prove a most alarming diminution in the products of French agriculture, manufactures, and commerce; and consequently, a great diminution in the means of subsistence, which necessarily produces a decrease, not an increase, of the numerical population. See this subject fully and conclusively argued by Sir James Steuart, in his " Political Economy," book 1st, chapters 3, 4, 5, 6; and by Mr. Malthus in his "Essay on Population," book 2d, chapter 11th. Indeed the whole of the subject is involved in this very simple and self-evident proposition of Sir James Steuart, "Mankind have ever been as to numbers, and must ever be in proportion to the food produced; and the food produced will be in the compound proportion of the fertility of the climate and the industry of the inhabitants.

Perhaps Mr. Walsh might not find it very easy to point out among the old men and boys of France, the fathers of this increased numerical population. It is stated, p. 6, of the "Letter," &c. that, according to the computations of the best writers on political

arithmetic, that no country can maintain at one time more than the one hundredth part of its military population in arms, without absolute ruin to its permanent prosperity; without materially crippling its agriculture, commerce, and manufactures. But France has for these twenty years past averaged full one tenth of her military population in arms; and consequently has most essentially narrowed the sources of her permanent strength, by withdrawing so large a portion of laborers from the loom and the plough; whence, of course, as the means of subsistence were lessened, the quantity of numerical population was also lessened. But doubtless, neither Mr. Walsh, nor any other political economist who espouses the opinion that France will subdue the whole European continent, attempts to deny that the present forced state of the French empire, surcharged as it is with military burdens, has an unavoidable tendency to wear out the national resources, and to leave her in a most forlorn condition of debility and helplessness. Yet these gentlemen appear to think that before the military paroxysm shall have exhausted France, she will be able to subdue all the nations of continental Europe; which being done, she will then have leisure and opportunity to recruit her diminished population. This then is precisely the point in issue between us; whether or not France will conquer Europe? Those who take the affirmative of the question contend, that France has the power to subdue, and to maintain in subjection, all Europe; because the surrounding nations cannot oppose any effectual resistance to her arms, long enough to exhaust her military population; and then to force her back within the limits of her ancient dominion. Those who defend the negative of the question, insist, that the whole effective population of France will be destroyed by a long continuance of a system of warfare, in which she is consuming her

capital, both of men and money; against Britain and the nations that she assists, which are only expending their annual revenue of property and population; their national capital of industry, and wealth, and people, being reserved as a fund of perpetual re-production for the services of the state.

Mr. Walsh also says, pp. 71-4, that if Buonaparte be suddenly destroyed, the conquest of Spain by France, though perhaps delayed, would be equally certain; because a French civil war, the probable consequences of Buonaparte's sudden death, would be short: would soon fix another military chief on the throne; and render France more powerful than ever. And Mr. Walsh quotes a long passage from the Grandeur et Decadence of M. Montesquieu, to prove that all nations become stronger and more terrible to their external neighbours by a civil war; because then " every man becomes a soldier, &c.But this reasoning, even if we allow it to be correct in its general application to countries in their ordinary state of society, is by no means conclusive as to the present condition of France; because now, at this time, all her people are military; by the conscription system, every male child, born within the circumference of the French Empire, is born a soldier; no civil war can possibly make her more military than she is now. The question then irresistibly presses itself; if, with the whole of her present, undivided military force, France cannot conquer Spain and Portugal, will she be more able to do it, if the sudden death of Napoleon should produce all the alarm and confusion of a civil war among the remaining generals; and weaken by diminishing the already too much exhausted military population of France? Add to this, is it extremely probable that the many surviving military chiefs will very speedily agree, to whom among themselves the rest shall transfer the implicit homage of that entire allegiance which they

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