ONE:On the declaration of war, Buonaparte resorted to a proceeding that had never been practised before, and which excited the most violent indignation in England. He ordered the detention of British subjects then in France, as prisoners of war. Talleyrand previously assured some British travellers, who applied to him for information, that they had nothing to fear; that their persons would be safe under the protection of a Government which, unlike that of Britain, observed the laws of nations, and Buonaparte caused his well-known agent, Louis Goldsmith, the editor of a French paper, the Argus, published in London, to insert the same assurance in that journal. Thus thrown off their guard, all the British in France were seized by authority of a proclamation of the 22nd of May. Numbers of these were families and individuals not resident in France, but merely hurrying home from Italy, Switzerland, etc. They numbered some 12,000, and were kept confined till the close of the wars. The pretext was the capture of two ships before war was declared, but they were not captured until the Ambassadors had withdrawn, or until an embargo had been laid by Napoleon on British shipping.
TWO:The Allies now determined to close in on all sides, and compel the French to a surrender. But Buonaparte, after some man?uvres to bring Blucher to actionthat general and the Crown Prince of Sweden having crossed to the left bank of the Elbefound it at length necessary to retreat to Leipsic. He reached that city on the 15th of October, and learned, to his great satisfaction, that whilst his whole force would be under its walls within twenty-four hours, the Austrians were advancing considerably ahead of the Prussians; and he flattered himself that he should be able to beat the Austrians before the other Allies could reach them.Sir Henry Hardinge, the new Governor-General of India, whom Sir Robert Peel recommended to the Board of Control, had been in the army since he was thirteen years of age. He had followed Wellington through all the battles of the Peninsular war, and had won all the military glory that could be desired, so that he was not likely to follow the example of Lord Ellenborough in opening fresh fields for the gathering of laurels in India. The Chairman of the East India Company, giving him instructions on his departure, cautioned him against following the example of Lord Ellenborough in appointing military officers as administrators in preference to the civil servants of the Crown. He reminded him that the members of the Civil Service were educated with a special view to the important duties of civil administration, upon the upright and intelligent performance of which so much of the happiness of the people depended. He expressed a hope that he would appreciate justly the eminent qualities of the civil servants of India; and that he would act towards the Sepoys with every degree of consideration and indulgence, compatible with the maintenance of order and obedience. He urged that his policy should be essentially pacific, and should tend to the development of the internal resources of the country, while endeavouring to improve the condition of the finances.
THREE:[453]"The Clare election supplied the manifest proof of an abnormal and unhealthy condition of the public mind in Irelandthe manifest proof that the sense of a common grievance and the sympathies of a common interest were beginning to loosen the ties which connect different classes of men in friendly relations to each other, to weaken the force of local and personal attachments, and to unite the scattered elements of society into a homogeneous and disciplined mass, yielding willing obedience to the assumed authority of superior intelligence hostile to the law and to the Government which administered it. There is a wide distinction (though it is not willingly recognised by a heated party) between the hasty concession to unprincipled agitation and provident precaution against the explosion of public feeling gradually acquiring the strength which makes it irresistible. 'Concede nothing to agitation,' is the ready cry of those who are not responsiblethe vigour of whose decisions is often proportionate to their own personal immunity from danger, and imperfect knowledge of the true state of affairs. A prudent Minister, before he determines against all concessionagainst any yielding or compromise of former opinionsmust well consider what it is that he has to resist, and what are his powers of resistance. His task would be an easy one if it were sufficient to resolve that he would yield nothing to violence or to the menace of physical force. In this case of the Clare election, and of its natural consequences, what was the evil to be apprehended? Not force, not violence, not any act of which law could take cognisance. The real danger was in the peaceable and legitimate exercise of a franchise according to the will and conscience of the holder. In such an exercise of that franchise, not merely permitted, but encouraged and approved by constitutional law, was involved a revolution of the electoral system in Irelandthe transfer of political power, so far as it was connected with representation, from one party to another. The actual transfer was the least of the evil; the process by which it was to be effectedthe repetition in each county of the scenes of the Clare electionthe fifty-pound free-holders, the gentry to a man polling one way, their alienated tenantry anotherall the great interests of the county broken down'the universal desertion' (I am quoting the expressions of Mr. Fitzgerald)the agitator and the priest laughing to scorn the baffled landlordthe local heaving and throes of society on every casual vacancy in a countythe universal convulsion at a general electionthis was the danger to be apprehended; those were the evils to be resisted. What was the power of resistance? 'Alter the law, and remodel the franchise,' was the ready, the improvident response. If it had been desired to increase the strength of a formidable confederacy, and, by rallying round it the sympathies of good men and of powerful parties in Great Britain, to insure for it a signal triumph, to extinguish the hope of effecting an amicable adjustment of the Catholic question, and of applying a corrective to the real evils and abuses of elective franchise, the best way to attain these pernicious ends would have been to propose to Parliament, on the part of the Government, the abrupt extinction of the forty-shilling franchise in Ireland, together with the continued maintenance of civil disability."
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