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TWO:Meantime Cambacrs and Fouch had dispatched couriers to Louis Buonaparte, in Holland, to march down troops to the defence of Antwerp; and he had not only done that, but had opened the sluices on the borders of the Scheldt, and laid the country under water, to prevent the march of the British. He also had ordered the erection of numerous batteries, and Bernadotte arrived in about a fortnight, by orders of Napoleon, to resist the advance of the British. From forty to fifty thousand troops were assembled in and around Antwerp, and hosts of Dutch and Belgian militia swarmed over the country. This was certain to be the case if any time was allowed, and it was now agreed, in a council of war, that it was not possible to proceed further. In fact, they were no longer allowed to remain where they were. Their provisions were rapidly being exhausted, sickness was spreading amongst the troops, and the fire of the enemy's batteries from both sides of the river compelled them to fall down the stream. That was the end of the campaign; the rest was a foolish and murderous delay in the island of Walcheren, without any conceivable purpose. There was no use in retaining the island, for we could at any time blockade the mouths of the Scheldt, and our men on board the ships were comparatively healthy; but in this swamp of death the soldiers continued dying like rotten sheep. The island of Walcheren, to which they were now confined, is a spongy swamp, below the level of the sea at high water. The wet oozes through the banks, and stagnates in the dykes, and is only capable of being pumped out by windmills. The ground is covered often with mud and slime, and the inhabitants are sickly and sallow in aspect, and of loose and flaccid muscles. Yet, in this den of fever and death, the commanders seemed determined to retain the army till it perished entirely. The Earl of Chatham himself returned to London on the 14th of September, with as many of the sick as he could take. At this time he left eleven thousand, out of the seventeen thousand quartered on the island of Walcheren, on the sick-list, and rapidly dying; yet neither he nor Sir Eyre Coote, who succeeded him, seems to have felt the necessity of saving the army by retiring from the place. They attributed the unhealthiness to the dykes being cut, and the surrounding country being flooded in the hot season. No matter what was the cause, the army was perishing, and ought to have been removed; but, so far from this, the Ministers seemed determined to keep possession of this useless and pestilential swamp at any cost. As it was imagined that the drinking of the water was the cause of the fever, Thames water was carried over for the troops, five hundred tons per week being required. But it was not the drinking it only that caused disease and death, but the standing and working in it, as many of them did, up to the middle for many hours together, and the malaria arising from the oozy soil. As the roofs in Flushing were knocked to pieces by the storming of the town, British workmen, with bricks, mortar, tiles, and tools, were sent over to repair them, so as to protect the sick in the hospitals, though plenty of workmen and materials might have been had in the country.
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TWO:On the 21st of March a Committee which had been appointed early in the Session to inquire into the public income and expenditure, and to suggest what might in future be calculated on as the clear revenue, presented its report through Mr. Grenville, their chairman. On the 29th, Pitt, in a Committee of the whole House, entered upon the subject, and detailed the particulars of a plan to diminish progressively and steadily the further debt. It appeared from the report of the select Committee that there was, at present, a clear surplus revenue of nine hundred thousand pounds sterling, and that this surplus could, without any great additional burthen to the public, be made a million per annum. This he declared to be an unexpected state of financial vigour after so long and unfortunate a war. The plan which he proposed was to pay two hundred and fifty thousand pounds quarterly into the hands of Commissioners appointed for the purpose to purchase stock to that amount, which was under par, or to pay stock above par, and thus cancel so much debt. In addition to this, the annuities for lives, or for limited terms, would gradually cancel another portion. All dividends arising from such purchases were to be similarly applied. Pitt calculated that by this process, and by the compound interest on the savings to the revenue by it, in twenty-eight years no less than four millions sterling per annum of surplus revenue would be similarly applied, or employed for the exigencies of the State. By this halcyon process he contemplated the eventual extinction of that enormous debt, to pay the mere interest of which every nerve had been stretched, and every resource nearly exhausted. In a delightful state of self-gratulation, Pitt declared that he was happy to say that all this was readily accomplishable; that we had nothing to fear, except one thingthe possibility of any Minister in need violating this fund. Had the original Sinking Fund, he said, been kept sacred, we should have had now very little debt. To prevent the recurrence of this fatal facility of Ministers laying their hands on this Fund, he proposed to place it in the hands of Commissioners, and he declared that "no Minister could ever have the confidence to come down to that House and desire the repeal of so beneficial a law, which tended so directly to relieve the people from their burthens." He added that he felt that he had by this measure "raised a firm column, upon which he was proud to flatter himself that his name might be inscribed." He said not a word about the name of Dr. Price being inscribed there, to whom the whole merit of the scheme belonged; he never once mentioned his name at all. On his own part, Dr. Price complained not of this, but that he had submitted three schemes to Pitt, and that he had chosen the worst.WASHINGTON AT VALLEY FORGE, BY THE CAMP FIRE. (See p. 247.)
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TWO:On the 19th of February the men heard an awful and mysterious sound, as if of thunder, beneath their feet. They instantly rushed to their arms, and thus many lives were saved. A tremendous earthquake shook down all the parapets built up with so much labour, injured several of the bastions, cast to the ground all the guard-houses, made a considerable breach in the rampart of a curtain in the Peshawur face, and reduced the Cabul gate to a shapeless mass of ruins. In addition to this sudden destruction of the fortificationsthe labour of three monthsone-third of the town was demolished. The report states that, within the space of one month, the city was thrown into alarm by the repetition of full 100 shocks of this phenomenon of Nature. Still, the garrison did not lose heart or hope. With indomitable energy, they set to work immediately to repair the damage. The shocks had scarcely ceased when the whole garrison was told off into working parties, and before night the breaches were scalped, the rubbish below was cleared away, and the ditches before them were dug out. From the following day all the troops off duty were continually at work, and so well sustained were their energy and perseverance, that by the end of the month the parapets were entirely restored, or the curtain was filled in, where restoration was impracticable, and every battery re-established. The breaches were built up with the rampart doubled in thickness, and the whole of the gates re-trenched. So marvellously rapid was the work of restoration that Akbar Khan declared that the earthquake must have been the effect of English witchcraft, as Jelalabad was the only place that escaped.
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