men and soldiers she cannot easily beat, France, after nearly twenty years of hard fighting, has not gained a single substantial advantage; but has lost an immensity of blood and treasure in the annihilation of her fleets, and the reduction of all her colonies; add to which, she experiences the mortification of seeing her armies, led on by her most experienced veteran generals, occasionally defeated by their British antagonists in the peninsula of Spain and Portugal.

Now I most sincerely believe every syllable of this to be good sense and entire truth; and for a melancholy illustration of the position that the main and efficient cause of the misfortunes of Austria was derived from the great corrupting influence which France exercised over the Aulic council, and the officers of the Austrian army, the reader is referred to a book intituled "Les Nouveaux Interets de l'Europe," published at Leipsic, in the year 1799, the following extract from which must suffice for the present: "The emperor (then of Germany, now of Austria) has been blamed for signing the preliminaries of Leoben, on the 18th of April, 1798. This certainly appears to have been done precipitately; but are those who blame him aware of the reasons which induced him to take that step? The emperor had been informed by his brother, the archduke Charles, of the bad disposition of a great part of the officers of his army of Italy. He knew that both at Verona and Padua they affected to imitate the French in their discourse, manners, and sentiments; they only needed the tri-colored cockade to make the resemblance complete. He was aware that they almost invariably fled in the most critical moment of an action; whence, in spite of excellent generals, a well-appointed staff, and the bravest troops, he was always obliged to retreat. He conceived that he was betrayed by these officers; for it is well known that Buonaparte in an

unguarded moment declared, that the Austrian army cost him more than his own." The same game of successful fraud was practised in order to destroy the Prussian monarchy; at the battle of Jena, more than half the Prussian soldiery were without cartridges or bayonets; and the fortresses, upon whose long and obstinate resistance the king of Prussia confidently relied, were almost instantly given up to the French, either through the treachery of the garrisons, or for want of ammunition. See the king of Prussia's Address to his army after the battle of Jena.

No doubt the French generals themselves are well aware of the deficiency in natural courage of their men; not only on account of the boasting of their bulletins and dispatches, which is incompatible with real valor, but also from their constant anxiety always to engage the enemy with the advantage of an immense superiority of numbers on their own side. And not contented with fighting the enemy in more numerous bodies than are opposed to them, they generally contrive to post a fresh army a few miles in the rear of their antagonists, who are thus inevitably destroyed, if they happen to be routed by the attack of the French in front. Buonaparte practised this manœuvre with the most fatal success at the battle of Jena, where with more than double the number of his opponents, he succeeded in putting the not sufficiently accoutred Prussians to the rout; and the fugitives were nearly all slain, or taken captive by the French army stationed about twenty miles in the rear of the field of battle; and the Prussian monarchy was extinguished at one blow. The same experiment was tried in 1809, by Marshal Victor upon the British at Talavera; he attacked with sixty thousand Frenchmen, Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had only twenty-five thousand men under his command; while Marshal Soult was posted about eighteen miles in the rear with twenty thousand men. The manœu

vre however failed, because the British beat the French, and drove Victor back beyond the Alberche; and when Sir Arthur Wellesley fell back for want of provisions, Marshal Soult finding that the English army, insead of being in full and disorderly flight towards Lisbon in consequence of sustaining an entire defeat, were regularly retreating to a better provisioned part of the country, he carried his troops off with all possible expedition out of the British line of march, and made a junction with Victor.

It would be absurd to deny the meed of most transcendant talents to Buonaparte and his generals; for nothing less than very superior genius and courage could possibly have borne them upwards to their present bad eminence, amidst the crowds of eager competitors for power and rapine; at a period when all the intellect of a numerous and ingenious people was let loose by the French revolution to struggle for mastery and dominion. And these astonishing military talents have more than compensated the want of natural courage in their men. But although the praise of great military talents is due to Buonaparte, there is nothing in the whole career of his public life that entitles him to the greater and more rare distinction of being considered as a statesman. Is it characteristic of a statesman to destroy the agriculture, to ruin the manufactures, to annihilate the commerce, to waste the population, to exhaust the finances, to eradicate the productive industry of the country, whose sceptre he wields, and to reduce the whole of his dominions to a desert? His present enormous power is owing chiefly to the weakness and corruption of the courts and cabinets of continental Europe which have opposed him, and which have suffered themselves to be cajoled or terrified into submission by a man who has made promises only to break them, and entered into the most solemn treaties only that he might violate them according to

his own views of individual expediency. Should there arise upon the continent of Europe any general who could beat him repeatedly in the field, not all his cabinet-tricks and frauds would suffice to save himself from perdition, or his empire from dismemberment. For a most masterly delineation of Napoleon's character in the capacity of a soldier, a philosopher, a legislator, and a statesman, see pp. 387 391, Vol. 1st, of the Quarterly Review, a work which for the soundness of its political views, and extent of information, is above all praise.

Proverbs are generally the collected wisdom of long and universal experience, concentrated into short and pithy sayings; and for full five centuries past has the following proverbial expression been floating in Europe; namely, "that French officers will always lead if their soldiers will follow; and that British soldiers will always follow if their officers will lead." This proverb seems clearly to denote two things, 1st, that the national courage of the British people is superior to that of the French; and 2dly, that the military discipline of the French is in general superior to that of the British army.

The reluctance of the French to join the armies of their emperor may be known from the slightest inspection of the provisions of the conscription-code itself; and although courage soon becomes a virtue of necessity in the miserable conscripts; and although the severity of discipline may compel, and the intoxication of frequent success inflame cowards to fight; yet in a reverse of fortune, the feelings of nature will return, and the fear of death and the desire of avoiding pain will triumph over all the exhortations of their generals and captains. And accordingly, no nation bears successive defeats so ill as the French, who ran like a flock of sheep on every occasion after the first few conflicts, before Suvarof and his Russians. Unfortunately for the repose of the world, of

late years the soldiers of France, particularly when commanded by Buonaparte in person, have not been accustomed to defeat; although they are at present occasionally receiving some lessons in that salutary school, from the British, the Spaniards, and the Portugueze, in the peninsula.

3. In addition to these two sources of internal weakness, France labors under another still more alarming evil; namely, the total decay of her productive industry. Mr. Walsh in his " Letter," &c. so of ten before referred to, pp. 77-195, sketches a masterly picture of the remediless misery of the French people groaning under the intolerable burden of taxes, levied in the most cruel manner; the decay of tillage; the drooping of manufactures; the extermination of commerce; the total insecurity of liberty, life, and limb. This portion of Mr. Walsh's book is extremely valuable, because it displays a knowledge of the financial system, and the interior of France, which, probably, cannot be obtained from any other accessible source of information. The following observations are to be considered as results from the facts contained in his work.

Until lately; that is to say, until Buonaparte by his blockading edicts of Berlin, of Milan, and of Bayonne, compelled the British government to retaliate upon him with their Orders in Council, France enjoyed the benefit of an uninterrupted communication with every part of the world, by means of neutral conveyance; and sent all her manufactures and staple commodities to the most advantageous markets without let or hindrance. This vast source of internal prosperity and wealth is now dried up. She exports as well as imports nothing. And if her manufacturers can find no foreign vent for their goods, they must cease to manufacture, and be reduced to extreme distress. If the cultivators of her soil can find no foreign demand for their produce; if their