Transcriber's Note:
A number of obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this text.
For a complete list, please see the bottom of this document.
"Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri
Per campos instructa, tuà sine parte pericli."
Lucret. Lib. ii. 5.
After a contest of twenty years' duration, Britain, thanks to herinsular position, her native energies, and the wisdom of her counsels,knows scarcely any thing of the calamities of war but from report, andfrom the comparatively easy pecuniary sacrifices required for itsprosecution. No invader's foot has polluted her shores, no hostile handhas desolated her towns and villages, neither have fire and swordtransformed her smiling plains into dreary deserts. Enjoying a happyexemption from these misfortunes, she hears the storm, which is destinedto fall with destructive violence upon others, pass harmlessly over herhead. Meanwhile the progress of her commerce and manufactures, and herimprovement in the arts, sciences, and letters, though liable, fromextraordinary circumstances, to temporary obstructions, are sure andsteady; the channels of her wealth are beyond the reach of foreignmalignity; and, after an unparalleled struggle, her vigour and herresources seem but to increase with the urgency of the occasions thatcall them forth.
Far different is the lot of other nations and of other countries. Thereis scarcely a region of [vi]Continental Europe but has in its turn drunkdeep within these few years of the cup of horrors. Germany, the theatreof unnumbered contests—the mountains of Switzerland, which for ages hadreverberated only the notes of rustic harmony—the fertile vales of thePeninsula—the fields of Austria—the sands of Prussia—the vast forestsof Poland, and the boundless plains of the Russian empire—havesuccessively rung with the din of battle, and been drenched with nativeblood. To the inhabitants of several of these countries, impoverished bythe events of war, the boon of British benevolence has been noblyextended; but the facts related in the following sheets will bear me outin the assertion, that none of these cases appealed so forcibly to theattention of the humane as that of Leipzig, and its immediate vicinity.Their innocent inhabitants have in one short year been reduced, by theinfatuation of their sovereign, and by that greatest of all curses, thefriendship of France, from a state of comfort to absolute beggary; andthousands of them, stripped of their all