flagrant than that of any other man; but these facts do not justify the breach of a capitulation. The very time, above all others, for justice to interpose, is when public interest or state necessity is urgent on the one hand, and an unprotected criminal exists on the other. Another of the paladins of the French Empire perished not long after, under circumstances to which the most fastidious sense of justice can take no exception. Murat, tormented with the thirst for power, and eager to regain his dominions, was fool-hardy enough to make a descent on the coast of Naples, with a few followers, in order to excite a revolt against the Bourbon government. He was seized, tried by a military commission, and shot. Napoleon did not long survive his old companions in arms. Although subjected to little restraint in St. Helena, permitted to ride over the island, and enjoy a degree of comfort and luxury that bore a striking contrast to the severity with which he had treated state prisoners; his spirit chafed against the coercion of being confined at all. Nevertheless, it was indispensable to the peace of the world, that his escape should be prevented; and his expedition from Elba had shown, that no reliance whatever could be placed on his promises or his treaties. Detention and safe custody therefore became unavoidable; and every comfort, consistent with these objects, was afforded him by the British government. He was allowed the society of the friends who accompanied him in his exile; he had books in abundance to amuse his leisure hours; saddle-horses were at his command; Champaigne and Burgundy were his daily beverage; and the bill of fare of his table, which Las Cases gives as a proof of the severity of the British authorities, would be thought by most persons a sumptuous and luxurious provision. If England had acted toward Napoleon as Napoleon did toward his imprisoned enemies, she would have shut him up in a fortress and murdered him in cold blood-as the Duke d'Enghein was murdered at Vincennes. In February, 1821, Napoleon, who had been for some time suffering with a cancer in the stomach, grew rapidly worse. He dictated his Will, On the with a great variety of minute bequests, but obstinately refused to take medicine. "All that is to happen," said he, "is written down; our hour is marked; we cannot prolong it a moment beyond the limit that fate has predestined." At two o'clock on the 3rd of May, he received extreme unction, and declared that he died in the Roman Catholic faith. 5th, a violent storm of wind and rain arose, and he expired during its greatest fury, uttering the words, "tête d'armée." Two singular iterns in his will deserve to be recorded: one was a request, that his body "might repose on the banks of the Seine among the people whom he had loved so well;" and the other, a legacy of ten thousand francs to a man who had been detected in an attempt to assassinate the Duke of Wellington. Napoleon had previously indicated the spot, in St. Helena, in which he wished his remains to be deposited. It was a small hollow called Slane's Valley, where a fountain, shaded with weeping willows, had long been his favorite retreat. He was laid in the coffin with his three-cornered hat, military surtout, leather under-dress and boots, as he used to appear on the field of battle. The body, after lying in state, was carried to the place of interment on the 8th of May, and buried with military honors: a stone of great size, but without inscription, covered the grave. Time rolled on with its changes. The dynasty of the Restoration proved unequal to the task of coercing the desires of the Revolution: a new generation arose, teeming with the passions and forgetful of the sufferings of former days; the revolt of the barricades, in 1830, restored the tricolorflag, and established a semi-revolutionary dynasty on the French throne. England shared in the convulsion of the period: a change in her constitution placed the popular party in power; a temporary alliance, founded on political passion, not national interest, united her government with that of France; and, under M. Thiers's administration, a request was made by France for the remains of her Emperor. England granted the request. The body of Napoleon was conveyed to Havre de Grace in the frigate La Belle Poule, and thence transferred to Paris. It was interred in the church of the Invalides on the 6th of December, 1840; and although the weather was intensely cold, six hundred thousand persons assembled to witness the ceremony. Louis Phi lippe and his court officiated on the occasion; but nothing awakened such deep feeling as a band of the mutilated veterans of the Old Guard who, with mournful visages but a military air, attended the remains of their beloved chief to his last resting-place. APPENDIX. [Mr. Alison's forty-first Chapter, which in the original work follows the campaign of Austerlitz, in 1805, contains much valuable information combined with many arguments and opinions on which the world is divided. It was omitted in the body of this volume because it could not well be abridged, and because, if given entire, it would too greatly have interrupted the narrative: it is therefore introduced here in the form of an Appendix and precisely in Mr. Alison's own words.] THE BRITISH FINANCES, AND MR. PITT'S SYSTEM OF FINANCIAL POLICY. Ir would be to little purpose that the mighty drama of the French Revolutionary wars was recorded in history, if the mainspring of all the European efforts, the BRITISH FINANCES, were not fully explained. It was in their boundless extent that freedom found a never-failing stay, in their elastic power that independence obtained a permanent support. When surrounded by the wreck of other nations; when surviving alone the fall of so many confederacies, it was in their inexhaustible resources that England found the means of resolutely maintaining the contest, and waiting calmly, on her citadel amid the waves, the return of a right spirit in the surrounding nations. Vain would have been the prowess of her seamen, vain the valor of her soldiers, if her national finances had given way under the strain; and the conquerors of Trafalgar and Alexandria must have succumbed in the contest they so heroically maintained, if they had not found in the resources of government the means of permanently continuing it. Vain even would have been the reaction produced by suffering against the French Revolution: vain the charnel-house of Spain and the snows of Russia, if England had not been in a situation to take advantage of the crisis; if she had been unable to aliment the war in the Peninsula when its native powers were prostrated in the dust; and the energies of awak. ened Europe must have been lost in fruitless efforts, if the wealth of England had not at last arrayed them, in dense and disciplined battalions, on the banks of the Rhine. How, then, did it happen that this inconsiderable island, so small a part of the Roman Empire, was enabled to expend wealth greater than ever had been amassed by the an. cient mistress of the world; to maintain a contest of unexampled magnitude for twenty years; to keep on foot a fleet which conquered the united navies of Europe, and an army which carried victory into every corner of the globe; to acquire a colonial empire that encircled the earth, and subdue the vast continent of Hindostan, at the very time that it struggled in Spain with the land-forces of Napoleon, and equipped all the armies of the North for the liberation of Germany? The solution of the phenomenon, unex. ampled in the history of the world, is without doubt to be in part found in the persevering industry of the British people, and the extent of the commerce which they maintained in every quarter of the globe; but the resources thus afforded would have been in. adequate to so vast an expenditure, and must have been exhausted early in the struggle, if they had not been organized and sustained by an admirable system of finance, which seemed to rise superior to every difficulty with which it had to contend. It is there that the true secret of the prodigy is to be found; it is there that the noblest monument to Mr. Pitt's wisdom has been erected. The national income of England at an early period was very inconsiderable, and totally incommensurate to the important station which she occupied in the scale of nations. In the time of Elizabeth it amounted only to £400,000 a year, and that of James I. to £450,000; and even including all the subsidies received from Parliament during his reign, £480,000 a year: sums certainly not equivalent to more than £800,000, or £1,000,000 of our money. That enjoyed by Charles I. amounted, on an average, tc £895,000, annually: a sum perhaps equal to £1,500,000 in these times.t It was the long parliament which first gave the example of a prodigious levy of money from the people in England; affording thus a striking instance of the eternal truth, that no government is so despotic as that of the popular leaders, when relieved from all control on the part of the other powers in the state. The sums levied in England during the Commonwealth, that is, from the 3rd of November, 1640, to the 5th of November, 1659, amounted to the enormous, and, if not proved by authentic documents, incredible sum of £83,000,000, being at the rate of nearly £5,000,000 a year; or more than five times that which had been so much the subject of complaint in the times of the unhappy monarch who had preceded it. The permanent revenue of Cromwell was raised from the three kingdoms to £1,868,000: or considerably more than double that enjoyed by Charles I. The total public income at the death of Charles II. was £1,800,000, of James II. £2,000,000; sums incredibly small, when it is recollected that the price of wheat was not then materially different from what it is at the present moment. These inconsiderable taxes, however, were destined to be exchanged for others of a very different character, upon the accession of the house of Brunswick to the throne. The intimate connexion of the princes of that family with Continental politics, and the long wars in which, in consequence, the nation was involved, soon led to a more burdensome system of taxation, and the raising of sums annually from the people which in former times would have been deemed incredible. So great was the increase of the public burdens during the reign of William, that the national income, in the thirteen years that he sat on the throne, was nearly doubled; being raised from £2,000,000 a year to £3,895,000. But the addition made to the public revenue was the least important part of the changes effected during this important period. It was then that the NATIONAL DEBT began; and government was taught the dangerous secret of providing for the necessities, and maintaining the influence of present times, by borrowing money and laying its payment on posterity.** Various motives combined to induce the government, immediately after the Revolu. tion, to adopt the system of borrowing on the credit of the state. Notwithstanding the temporary unanimity with which the Revolution had been brought about, various heartburnings and divisions had succeeded that event, and the exiled dynasty still numbered a large and resolute body, especially in the rural districts, among their adherents. Ex Ib. vii., 341. Pebrer, 45. * Hume v., 412. vi., 112. "It is seldom," says Hume, "that the people gain anything by revolutions in government, because the new settlement, jealous and insecure, must commonly be supported with more expense and severity than the old; but on no occasion was the truth of this maxim more sensibly felt than in England after the overthrow of the royal authority. Complaints against the oppression of ship-money, and the tyranny of the star chamber, had roused the people to arms, and, having gained a complete victory over the crown, they found themselves loaded with a multiplicity of taxes formerly unknown, while scarce an appearance of law and liberty remained in any part of the administration."a The following are some of the items in this enormous aggregate of £83,000,000 raised from the nation during the Commonwealth-a striking proof of the despotic character of the executive during that period: £1,517,274 £1,868,716 51s. 11id. 44s. 7d. In 1835, the average of the quarter in Great Britain was 38s. 8d., and the average of the last five years was only 488.-SMITH'S Wealth of Nations, i., 358, and Corn Average, 1835. T Pebrer, 139, 143. ** Pebrer, 59, 60. a Hume vii., 115. |