They gained their point-they accomplished their wishes; and the consequence has been, two years of suffering, followed by military despotism. We always predicted the three glorious days would lead to this result; but the termination of the drama has come more rapidly than the history of the first Revolution led us to anticipate.

PARTITION OF THE KINGDOM OF THE

NETHERLANDS

[BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, DECEMBER 1832]*

IT is related by Bourrienne, that it was during the visit of Napoleon to the shores of the ocean, by order of the Directory, in February 1798, to prepare for the invasion of England, that he first was struck with the vast importance of Antwerp as a naval station to effect that great object of Gallic ambition. The impression then made was never afterwards effaced; his eagle eye at once discerned that it was from that point that the army destined to conquer England must sail. Its secure and protected situation, guarded alike by powerful fortresses, and an intricate and dangerous inland navigation; its position at the mouth of the Scheldt, the great artery of the Flemish provinces of the Empire; its proximity on the one hand to the military resources of France, and on the other to the naval arsenals of the United Provinces; its near neighbourhood to the Thames and the Medway, the centre of the power of England and the most vulnerable point of its empire, all pointed it out as the great central depot where the armament for the subjugation of this country was to be assembled, as the advanced work of French ambition against English independence. No sooner had he seized the reins of power than he turned his attention to the strengthening of this important station. All the resources of art, all the wealth of the imperial treasury, were lavished upon its fortification; rampart after rampart, bastion after bastion, surrounded its ample harbour; docks capable of holding the whole navy of

* Written during the siege of the citadel of Antwerp by the combined French and English forces.

France were excavated; and the greatest fleet which ever menaced England was assembled within its walls. Before the fall of his power, thirty-five ships of the line were safely moored under its cannon; he held to it with tenacious grasp under all the vicissitudes of his fortune; and when the Allies approached its walls, he sent the ablest and firmest of the republicans, Carnot, to prolong even to the last extremity its means of defence. "If the Allies were encamped," said he in the Legislative Body, on the 31st March 1813, "on the heights of Montmartre, I would not surrender one village in the thirty-second military division." Though hard pressed

in the centre of his dominions, he still clung to this important bulwark. When the Old Guard was maintaining a desperate struggle in the plains of Champagne, he drafted not a man from the fortifications of the Scheldt; and when the conqueror was struck to the earth, his right hand still held the citadel of Antwerp.

In all former times, and centuries before the labour of Napoleon had added so immensely to its importance, the Scheldt had been the centre of the most important preparations for the invasion of England, and the spot on which military genius always fixed from whence to prepare a descent on this island. An immense expedition, rendered futile by the weakness and vacillation of the French Monarch, was assembled in it in the fourteenth century; and sixty thousand men on the shore of the Scheldt awaited only the signal of Charles VI. to set sail for the shore of Kent. The greatest naval victory ever gained by the English arms was that at Sluys, in 1340, when Philip of France lost 30,000 men and 230 ships of war in an engagement off the Flemish coast with Edward III.,+ a triumph greater, though less noticed in history, than either that of Cressy or Poictiers. When the great Duke of Parma was commissioned by Philip II. of Spain to take steps for the invasion of England, he assembled the forces of the Low Countries at Antwerp; and the Spanish Armada, had it proved successful, was to have wafted over that great commander from the banks of the Scheldt to the opposite shore of Essex, at the head of the veterans who had been trained in the Dutch war. In an evil hour, Charles II., bought by French gold, and seduced by

* Sismondi's Hist. de France, xi. 387.

+ Hume, ii. 230.

French mistresses, entered into an alliance with Louis XIV. for the coercion of Holland; the Lilies and the Leopards, the navies of France and England, assembled together at Spithead, and made sail for the French coast, while the armies of the Grande Monarque advanced across the Rhine into the heart of the United Provinces. The consequence was such a prodigious addition to the power of France, as it took all the blood and treasure expended in the war of the Succession and all the victories of Marlborough to reduce to a scale at all consistent with the independence of the other European states. Mr Pitt, how adverse soever to engage in a contest with republican France, was driven to it by the advance of the tricolor standard to the Scheldt, and the evident danger which threatened English independence from the possession of its fortresses by the French armies; and the event soon proved the wisdom of his foresight. The surrender of the Low Countries, arising from the insane demolition of its fortresses by the Emperor Joseph, soon brought the French armies to Amsterdam; twenty years of bloody and destructive war, the slaughter of millions, and the contraction of eight hundred millions of debt by this country, followed the victorious march of the French armies to the banks of the Scheldt; while seventeen years of unbroken rest, a glorious peace, and the establishment of the liberties of Europe upon a firm basis, immediately succeeded their expulsion from them by the arms of Wellington.

Before these sheets issue from the press, an English and French fleet will have sailed from the British shores to co-operate with a French army IN RESTORING ANTWERP TO FRANCE. The tricolor flag has floated alongside of the British pendant; the shores of Spithead, which never saw a French fleet but as prizes, have witnessed the portentous coalition, and the unconquered citadels of England thundered with salutes to the enemies who fled before them at Trafalgar ! Antwerp, with its dockyards and its arsenals; Antwerp, with its citadel and its fortifications; Antwerp, the outpost and stronghold of France against English independence, is to be purchased by British blood for French ambition! Holland, the old and faithful ally of England; Holland, which has stood by us in good and evil fortune for one

hundred and fifty years; Holland, the bulwark of Europe, in every age, against Gallic aggression, is to be partitioned and sacrificed in order to plant the standards of a revolutionary power on the shores of the Scheldt! Deeply has England already drunk, deeper still is she destined to drink, of the cup of national humiliation, for the madness of the last two years.

Disgraceful as these proceedings are to the national honour and integrity of England; far as they have lowered its ancient flag beneath the degradation it ever reached in the darkest days of national disaster, their impolicy is, if possible, still more conspicuous. Flanders, originally the instructor, has in every age been the rival of England in manufactures; Holland, being entirely a commercial state, and depending for its existence upon the carrying trade, has in every age been her friend. The interest of these different states has led to this opposite policy, and must continue to do so, until a total revolution in the channels of commerce takes place. Flanders, abounding with coal, with capital, with great cities, and a numerous and skilful body of artisans, has, from the earliest dawn of European history, been conspicuous for her manufactures; Holland, without any advantages for the fabricating of articles, but with immense ones for their transport, has, from the establishment of Dutch independence, been the great carrier of Europe. She feels no jealousy of English manufactures, because she has none to compete with them; she feels the greatest disposition to receive the English goods, because all those which are sent to her add to the riches of the United Provinces. Belgium, on the other hand, is governed by a body of manufacturers, who are imbued with a full proportion of that jealousy of foreign competition which is so characteristic in all countries thus occupied. Hence, the Flemish ports have always been as rigorously closed as the Dutch were liberally opened to British manufactures; and, at this moment, not only are the duties on the importation of British goods greatly higher in Flanders than they are in Holland, but the recent policy of the former country has been as much to increase, as that of the other has been to lower its import burdens. Since the Belgian Revolution, the duties on all the staple commodities of England—coal,