"Thou first and last of fields, king-making victory."--Byron.
England has now been blest with thirty-seven years of peace. At
no other period of her history can a similarly long cessation
from a state of warfare be found. It is true that our troops
have had battles to fight during this interval for the protection
and extension of our Indian possessions and our colonies; but
these have been with distant and unimportant enemies. The danger
has never been brought near our own shores, and no matter of
vital importance to our empire has ever been at stake. We have
not had hostilities with either France, America, or Russia; and
when not at war with any of our peers, we feel ourselves to be
substantially at peace. There has, indeed, throughout this long
period, been no great war, like those with which the previous
history of modern Europe abounds. There have been formidable
collisions between particular states; and there have been still
more formidable collisions between the armed champions of the
conflicting principles of absolutism and democracy; but there has
been no general war, like those of the French Revolution, like
the American, or the Seven Years' War, or like the War of the
Spanish Succession. It would be far too much to augur from this, that no similar wars will again convulse the world; but the value of the period of peace which Europe has gained, is incalculable; even if we look on it as only a truce, and expect again to see the nations of the earth recur to what some philosophers have termed man's natural state of warfare.
No equal number of years can be found, during which science, commerce, and civilization have advanced so rapidly and so extensively, as has been the case since 1815. When we trace their progress, especially in this country, it is impossible not to feel that their wondrous development has been mainly due to the land having been at peace. Their good effects cannot be obliterated, even if a series of wars were to recommence. When we reflect on this, and contrast these thirty-seven years with the period that preceded them, a period of violence, of tumult, of unrestingly destructive energy,--a period throughout which the wealth of nations was scattered like sand, and the blood of nations lavished like water,--it is impossible not to look with deep interest on the final crisis of that dark and dreadful epoch; the crisis out of which our own happier cycle of years has been evolved. The great battle which ended the twenty-three years' war of the first French Revolution, and which quelled the man whose genius and ambition had so long disturbed and desolated the world, deserves to be regarded by us, not only with peculiar pride, as one of our greatest national victories, but with peculiar gratitude for the repose which it secured for us, and for the greater part of the human race.
One good test for determining the importance of Waterloo, is to
ascertain what was felt by wise and prudent statesmen before that
battle, respecting the return of Napoleon from Elba to the
Imperial throne of France, and the probable effects of his
success. For this purpose, I will quote the words, not of any of
our vehement anti-Gallican politicians of the school of Pitt, but
of a leader of our Liberal party, of a man whose reputation as a
jurist, a historian and a far-sighted and candid statesman, was, and is, deservedly high, not only in this country, but throughout Europe. Sir James Mackintosh, in the debate in the British House of Commons, on the 20th April, 1815, spoke thus of the return from Elba:--