1829.] homestic Politics. 247 



he may possess ; at the head of a Cabinet, from which he has never 

 heard a murmur of resistance, and will never hear a murmur — a Cabi- 

 net selected by his own volition, with as much a view to its humble 

 acquiescence, as the selection of his servants' hall. And what is his 

 answer to the national demand ? Nothing. In our Foreign policy, in 

 our domestic, in our trade, our laws, our agriculture, our manufactures, 

 he has not originated one great measure. If his own horse had been 

 stabled in the closet of Downing Street, its council could not have been 

 more thoroughly a negation. But the " great statesman" is keeping his 

 strength in repose, is watching events, is waiting for the march of 

 affairs ! How long is the nation to be trifled with by such babbling ? 

 — waiting for the march of affairs ! — while thousands and tens of thou- 

 sands of our manufacturers are starving, while trade is trembling through 

 every limb, while the bankrupt gazette is swelling hour by hour, while 

 the confused and neglected state of our agricultural laws is driving 

 the farmer to ruin, forcing the population to supplicate for leave to 

 transport themselves to the ends of the earth ; and threatening to con- 

 clude the long catalogue of national inflictions by the horrors of famine ! 



The mind that with such demands upon it does nothing, may be 

 either a crafty mind, or an indolent one, or a voluptuous one, or an 

 exhausted one ; but it is not the mind of a " great statesman." It may be 

 the mind of an ambitious grasper at authority, or of a vain lover of the 

 adulation of the bowing menials and beggarly instruments of place, or 

 of an insatiable lover of public lucre ; but it bears none of the true stamp 

 of command. It is incapable of administering the councils of a great 

 people. The capacity for the rough details of a camp never yet was 

 the capacity for a cabinet. The education of a soldier never yet was the 

 education of a legislator. And the hour that shall see any thing higher 

 than the campaigning trickery of espionage, and the headlong and 

 peremptory mandate of the truncheon, demanded in the cabinet, will 

 see the utter emptiness of those haughty claims to the honours of a 

 " great statesman." 



In those remarks we have judged the Premier by the facts before us. 

 His victory of Waterloo has its full share of distinction. It was a 

 great success, and could have been obtained by none but a distinguished 

 general. We cast aside all the rumours which might tend to disparage 

 his generalship on that memorable occasion. Allowing that he was 

 unprepared for the enemy's advance, that he threw a fourth of his army 

 bejfbre forty thousand French troops, at Quatre Bras, without cavalry 

 or artillery ; and that nothing but the iron bravery of British soldiers 

 could have out-fought the immense superiority of force at either Quatre 

 Bras, or Waterloo, still the honours are due to the man who com- 

 manded those soldiers. Yet the value of the victory has been ridicu- 

 lously magnified ; and nothing but the frenzy of party spirit, or the 

 folly of personal adulation could liave called Waterloo the " Saving of 

 England." It may have been the saving of France ; for it saved her 

 from being trampled into blood and ashes by the armies of the combined 

 continent. The defeat of the British in Flanders, would have inundated 

 her fields with a million of armed men, ready to be followed by milHons. 

 But it is mere burlesque to say, that if Napoleon had rode over the 

 Britisl) army and its general too, he would have been a step nigher [to 

 overthrow of England. What ! without a ship on the seas, with the 

 whole continent in arms, with the whole population of the em[)ire ready 

 to meet him on its shores, if he should by lui icle have crossed the sea ! 

 The supposition may figure at a cabinet dinner, or in a tavern speech, 

 but it is unworthy of a sober understanding. 



