main thing-the moral effect of the discipline of the separate as compared with that of the associated system.

But then it may be argued that the associated prisoners work, and that their work will have a moneyed value. Let this be granted: what is that value? Mr. Burt shows that, owing to the longer detention of convicts under the mixed system, there will be an increase of about 4000 prisoners in the United Kingdom above the number retained on hand under the separate system. These additional 4000 prisoners must demand an additional outlay for lodging, feeding, and supervising; the yearly cost of each man of them will be about 307.-or 120,000l. for the whole 4000. Allow that, one with another, the annual value of the labour per man is 107., or 40,000l. for the whole, it follows that 80,000l. will have to be paid yearly by the public under the mixed system, which would not be required under the separate. In other words, the expenditure will be equivalent to a perpetual vote of 80,000l. per annum for public works. Mr. Burt is of opinion that any good contractor would finish the work required as cheaply, in a much shorter time than he now can, when he is encumbered with convict labour, over which he has but a limited and divided control, and the individuals furnishing which are, for the most part, unskilled and unwilling workmen.

We are well aware that we have in this paper been dealing with little more than one branch of a wide subject-but we hope even so we may have done something for the correction of prevailing prejudices;-and as to the fearfully complicated controversy concerning the transportation system itself, we shall only say at present with what pleasure we received the disclaimer of any resolution to part with it utterly, which the Duke of Newcastle lately pronounced in the House of Lords. Every one must feel what a burthen of embarrassment the new Government has inherited as to this and indeed every other question at all connected with our position as the parent and head of a vast Colonial Empire. But we will not believe that as to this specific matter the difficulty is such as would be found insuperable by ministers of clear views and steady decision. If none of the old colonies will now take our convicts, we must found new ones on purpose-and when we look at the map it seems, in fact, almost absurd to doubt that for this purpose we have ample resources and opportunities at our command.

ART.

ART. IX.-1. Le Duc de Wellington. Par Jules Maurel. Bruxelles. 8vo. 1853.

2. Wellington-His Character-his Actions—and his Writings. By J. Maurel. London. Fcap. 8vo.

THIS

HIS is a remarkable work, if it were only for its singularity. It is written by a Frenchman, who appreciates the actions and character of the Duke of Wellington, with not only a degree of care, candour, and justice, of which we know few, if any, instances amongst his countrymen, but with a delicacy, a sagacity, and a discrimination which have certainly not been surpassed amongst ourselves. He has of course no new facts to tell wellinformed people in France, or any one in England, but he presents the subject in a point of view sufficiently novel to excite a considerable interest in both countries. We learn from a short preface which the Earl of Ellesmere has prefixed to an English translation, that the name and antecedents of M. Maurel are well known in the highest literary circles of Brussels, where he now resides, and of Paris, where he was formerly connected with that most respectable of sources of public instruction in France, the Journal des Débats. His work (Lord E. continues) will speak for itself; but those who read, while they admire, may be glad to know that the author is a gentleman of high private character, as well as established literary reputation.'

M. Maurel is ashamed of the low-minded, and indignant at the suicidal injustice of his countrymen, who endeavour to diminish a glory to which it would be more reasonable, and in fact more patriotic, to allow its fullest measure, since they cannot deny the great FACT, that it had outshone and finally extinguished that of the Idol of their adoration. But the idol himself it was who bequeathed them the example of this inconsistent and ignoble feeling. Whenever he spoke of the Duke at St. Helena, it was in such paroxysms of rage and rancour that even Las Cases seems ashamed of repeating them. After making an apology for exhibiting his hero in one of these disgraceful fits of fury and falsehood, he thus naïvement accounts for their not being more frequent :

'I remarked,' says he, that the Emperor had an extreme repugnance to mention Lord Wellington's name: to be sure he must have felt awkward at publicly depreciating HIM under whom he had fallen!' (il se trouvait gauche à ravaler publiquement celui sous lequel il avait succombe).- Las Cases, vii. 209.

The alternative of getting rid of the awkwardness, by speaking with common decency and truth of the Duke of Wellington,

does

does not seem to have occurred to either Las Cases or his Master:-nor in truth to any French writer that we have seen, except to M. Lamartine,* feebly, and more fully to M. Alphonse de Beauchamp, in their respective histories-the author of an article on the Duke's Dispatches in the Revue des Deux Mondes for September, 1839 (said to be M. Loëve Weimar), who seemed willing to treat it as fairly as the prejudices of his readers would allow and now M. Maurel, who, bolder than the reviewer, examines it more frankly, and from a wider and higher point of view, as a statesman and a moralist. Fortune, Luck, Accidentsuch, in the philosophy of all other French historians is the chief, and in most of them the only explanation of a gradual and unbroken series of successes which-not merely by their number and continuity, but by their concatenation and the obvious identity of the principle that pervades them-could no more be the effect of mere chance than the great operations of the natural world-which offer, as we see, various phases and are subject to occasional disturbances-but, on the whole, bear unquestionable evidence of one great and invariable principle of order and action.

In the very motto of his work M. Maurel protests against this flattering unction for the amour propre blessé of his countrymen. 'Nullum numen abest si sit PRUDENTIA: sed te

Nos facimus, FORTUNA, deam, coloque locamus.'

Which may be rendered,

'FORTUNE's an idol, to whose share is given

Results that PRUDENCE draws, in truth, from heaven.'

Even M. Thiers, who has something of a name to risk, and who labours to make an étalage of his candour, cannot get out of that vulgar ornière, and in the face of those immortal Dispatches which he pretends to have read, he persists in placing chance as the first ingredient of the Duke of Wellington's successes. We need not go far for examples. In the first three passages of his so-called 'History' in which the Duke makes his appearance, he is accompanied by this imaginary deity-who predominates over all the other elements of success which M. Thiers condescends to allow him.

This was Sir Arthur Wellesley-since celebrated as much for his good Fortune as for his great military qualities.'-Hist. du Con. et l'Emp., ix. 172.

Sir Arthur's expedition to Portugal in 1808 was, it seems, intended at first for Spain, but, on consideration, he resolves to disembark near the Tagus

to avail himself of the occasions which Fortune might offer him, and of the chance of striking some lucky stroke,' &c.—ib. 175. To this, like the pedant who lectured Hannibal on the art of war, M. Thiers adds that Sir Arthur's military movements were all rash and wrong, but that he was induced to hazard them from a jealous impatience to do something brilliant before he should be superseded by the senior officers that were daily expected (ib. 175); and these assertions he ventures to accompany with distinct professions of familiarity with the Dispatches, in which, had he read them,* he must have seen the clearest proofs that Sir Arthur's disembarkation in Portugal was no result either of accident or of second-thought-that the first object of the instructions under which he himself sailed from Ireland, and the rendezvous prescribed from the outset for all the different detachments that were to compose his army, was the Tagus; and that, as to his having rashly hurried into action from selfish jealousy, the very same Dispatch, from the Government at home, which announced that he might be superseded by a senior officer, directed him

'to carry his instructions into execution with every expedition that circumstances will admit, without awaiting the arrival of the LieutenantGeneral.'-15th July, 1808, Desp. iv. 18.

Again: when Wellesley wins the battle of Vimieiro-entirely -as Field-Marshal Thiers thinks-through the rashness and blunders of Junot, who ought to have thrown him into the sea' and precipitated him over the cliffs into the abyss' (le jeter dans la mer-précipité dans les flôts de l'abîme, ib. 182) in front of which he had taken up his very injudicious position-when, we say, he had won this battle, which he ought to have lost, M. Thiers's only remark is, that

'he was always lucky throughout his brilliant career.'-ib. 185.

Thus, on his very first appearance on the scene, prejudging— and by anticipation discolouring-the whole of that brilliant career' which the reluctant Historian must by and bye deal with in detail, as being from first to last the creature of patronizing Luck. If his wry-mouthed candour allows Wellesley certain

*We have heard, indeed (though we cannot ourselves vouch for the fact), that M. Thiers, when last in England, confessed that his acquaintance with the Dispatches was but slight, and even recent. Its slightness we never doubted, and that, such as it may be, he acquired it recently, is additionally confirmed by his long and pompous narration of the affair at Roliça, in which he asserts that the English lost from 1200 to 1500 men killed-tués. The Duke's official return, which we need not say is scrupulously correct, and accounts for every man, is 71 men and 4 officers killed. There is not a page of all this portion of M. Thiers' work that does not exhibit the same style of fanfaronnade, on which we think even he could not have ventured if he had read the Dispatches.

'great

'great military qualities'-to wit, 'good sense and firmness -it is only to sharpen in the next line a sneer at his want of genius (ib. 175).

And again :

The slow and steady English soldier was the natural instrument of the narrow but wise and resolute mind of Sir Arthur Wellesley.'— ib. 177.

The narrow mind' of the Duke of Wellington!-and this written sixteen years after the publication of the Dispatches!

It is in answer to the strain of M. Thiers, and to the still more flagrant malevolence of minor scribblers, but, above all, of the great father of lies-Buonaparte himself-that M. Maurel takes a nobler as well as a more philosophical review of the whole life of the Duke of Wellington. He asks whether fortune, unaccompanied by prudence and genius, could have fought its way through eight campaigns, of various characters, but of uninterrupted successes -in Portugal, Spain, France, and Flanders-from Vimieiro in 1808 to Waterloo in 1815. Who else, he asks, of the privileged few who have influenced the destinies of mankind, can present himself to posterity, proof in hand, and say,

'Hence I set out-this was my object-here is my result, and these are the ways by which I arrived at it? I do not forget what I may have owed to fortune,-which must always have a great share in these matters-but here is what I have done to limit and contract that share. I lay before you-without reserve-my hopes, my projects, my plans, my means, my victories, and the reasons of my victories. Judge them and me!"

'Such an appeal would have something theatrical, and not at all suitable to the character of Wellington; but it would nevertheless be exactly true-for the Dispatches are the real summary of his military life. He might have spoken thus without depreciating friends, without offending enemies, without departing from the most rigid and modest truth: but he has done the same thing in a still better taste. He has left these memorials of his life as a legacy to history, in their strict chronological order, in their exact original state - he has not suppressed a line-nor added a word of commentary-nor a word of argument nor a word of accusation — nor a word of justification ! A number of the letters are in French; and though these contain many striking thoughts and happy expressions, there are many incorrectnesses of style: nothing would have been easier than to have removed these faults without altering the sense, or even diminishing the force of the expression. Wellington would do no such thing.

If he has written bad French it must remain bad French. He chooses to appear what he is and nothing else. This literary good faith is but another form of the same uncompromising probity that distinguished him as a public officer and a private man. Even this trifle-if anything could be trifling where good faith is concerned-is his final

homage