force triumphed, and peace was restored to the trembling city. What has been the consequence? All the forms of law have been suspended; military commissions established; domiciliary visits become universal; several thousand persons thrown into prison; and, before this, the fusillades of the new heroes of the Barricades have announced to a suffering country that the punishment of their sins has commenced. The liberty of the press is destroyed, the editors delivered over to military commissions, the printing presses of the Opposition journals thrown into the Seine, and all attempts at insurrection, or words tending to excite it, and all offences of the press tending to excite dissatisfaction or revolt, handed over to military commissions, composed exclusively of officers! This is the freedom which the three glorious days have procured for France!

The soldiers were desperately chagrined and mortified at the result of the three days of July; and well they might be so, as all the subsequent sufferings of their country, and the total extinction of their liberties on the last occasion, were owing to their vacillation in the first revolt. They have now fought with the utmost fury against the people, as they did at Lyons, and French blood has amply stained their bayonets; but it has come too late to wash out the stain of their former treason, or revive the liberties which it lost for their country.

Polignac is now completely justified for all but the incapacity of commencing a change of the constitution with five thousand men, four pieces of cannon, and eight rounds of grape-shot to support it. The ordinances of Charles X., now adopted with increased severity by Louis Philippe, were destined to accomplish, without bloodshed, that change which the fury of democracy rendered necessary, and without which it has been found the Throne of the Barricades cannot exist. It is evident that the French do not know what freedom is. They had it under the Bourbons, as our people had it under the old constitution; but it would not content them, because it was not liberty, but power,not freedom, but democracy,-not exemption from tyranny, but the power of tyrannising over others,-that they desired.

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