124 MARLBOROUGH AND HIS METHODS OF WARFARE. 
deal with history that I say so—that I really believe it is perfectly disgraceful to find 
the great majority of the ingenuous youths of England, whether they are poor men’s 
sons or rich men’s sons, without the slightest knowledge of the conditions of our 
national existence. I think it is a positive danger and no such educational 
absurdity is possible in any other civilized country. I wish some person in 
authority would try to remedy this evil. I was once on an electioneering cam- 
paign, and I was talking with a candidate—a man of high position—before the 
meeting ; he thought that Ligny was a place near Belfast, and he had not the 
slightest notion of the circumstances under which the younger Pitt brought 
about that Union concerning which he very rightly went into rhapsodies. 
I have no more to say, my Lord, and gentlemen, except to thank you for your 
kind reception of my lecture. 
Tue CHAIRMAN—(who on rising was greeted with prolonged applause). 
Gentlemen, in common, I am sure, with everybody present, I have listened 
with great interest to this lecture. It is upon a subject of which I know a little, 
but it is a very big subject, and I am lost in astonishment at the Lecturer being 
able to convey, as he has done, in the short time he was on his legs, so much in- 
formation upon it. The period referred to embraces ten years of continual 
warfare, not a ten years in which there was an occasional campaign here and an 
occasional battle there, but in each year of that great decade of glory for England, 
there was a glorious campaign. ‘To attempt to deal in anything like detail with 
any particular battle would be quite impossible, to me at all events. But the 
Lecturer has done so as regards two or three of the great events of Marlborough’s 
wars. He has done so very lucidly, and has conveyed a considerable amount of 
information to us. 
We have much information upon a great number of the world’s battles in what 
I may style the classical period, and know much of some of the greatest sieges of 
antiquity. Who, for instance, does not know something about the siege of Troy— 
yet most of us know little indeed about Marlborough’s campaigns or sieges. I 
am sorry to say this, but it is the fact, there is a great paucity of information 
in English history about his wars, looking at them from a military point of view. 
You will find volumes in libraries upon the political points that were raised by 
Marlborough’s battles, but you will find very little that describes minutely the 
campaigns that he conducted, or that enters at all into anything like a minute 
description of any battle that he fought during his great career. It is a great 
shame to us—I think the Lecturer has referred to the fact—that there is no 
really good book upon Marlborough’s wars existing in England, and that if you 
want anything like a readable account of his campaigns you have to turn to the 
pages of that history to which the Lecturer has referred, the book published by 
order of Napoleon—I think it was in the year 1806 and not in 1809 as the 
Lecturer said. 
Now I will tell you a curious thing about the publication of that book, a work 
which I recommend you all to read. It is a very readable book and describes 
Marlborough’s campaigns in an admirable manner. In the year 1805, as you all 
know, Napoleon had a big camp at Boulogne when he, [ think I may .say, 
certainly intended to invade England. I know this is a moot point that has been 
raised more than once by historians and by people who wish to make out that an 
invasion of this country is an impossibility. Many books have been published 
to prove that Napoleon never did intend to invade England, but I cannot imagine 
any dispassionate reader of history who will take the trouble to enquire into the 
eircumstances which took Napoleon to Boulogne in 1805, arriving at that con- 
cusion, I at least have no doubt in my humble mind that Napoleon intended 
to invade England in that year, and that he was only prevented doing so by the 
glorious victory won for us by Nelson at Trafalgar. Now it is interesting to 
