FORE:Lord Londonderry, wearied with the labours of the Session, had retired to his country seat at North Cray Farm, near Bexley, in Kent, to recruit his strength, and prepare to take his part as the representative of England at the forthcoming Congress of Verona, which was to be held in October. There, on the 12th of August, he committed suicide by cutting the carotid artery with a penknife. Lord Eldon, in a letter on the subject, says:"I learn, upon the best authority, that for two or three days he was perfectly insane; and the medical men attribute that fact to the operation upon his head of the unceasing attention to business which the last harassing Session (to him) called for." The disease would appear to have been coming on some time before; he had got the idea that he was beset by secret enemiesthat he was the object of conspiracies. He was full of apprehension of being waylaid in the Park, and he felt that his life was every hour in danger. His mind gave way under the pressure of these morbid fears, and he put an end to his existence in the fifty-third year of his age. Impartial history, we think, will come to the conclusion that, with intellectual abilities not much above mediocrity, he owed his success as a statesman, in a great measure, to his fixity of purpose, and to his audacity, courage, and perseverance in adhering to his line of action in the midst of the most formidable difficulties; while the strength of his will was aided by a commanding person, an imperturbable temper, extreme affability, and winning frankness of manner. Of the policy of the Government in which he bore so long a leading part, it must be said that it was narrow, exclusive, jealous of popular rights, favourable to despotism abroad and at home, devoted to the interests of the Throne and the aristocracy, at the expense of social order and national progress. Such, at all events, was the impression of the majority of the nation, and the detestation in which the London populace held his character as a statesman was painfully evinced by the shouts of exultation which followed his coffin into Westminster Abbey, where it was deposited between the remains of Fox and Pitt. This conduct greatly shocked Lord Eldon. "This morning," he writes, "I have been much affected by attending Lord Londonderry to his grave. The concourse of people between St. James's Square and the Abbey was very great; the great bulk of them behaving decorously, some behaving otherwise; but I protest I am almost sorry to have lived till I have seen in England a collection of persons so brutalised as, upon the taking the coffin at the Abbey door out of the hearse, to have received it with cheering for joy that L. was no more. Cobbett and the paper called the[227] Statesman have, by the diabolical publications he and that paper have issued, thus demoralised these wretches."Meanwhile, Buonaparte was preparing to descend like an avalanche on this absurdly inflated nation. To set himself at ease with the North, whilst thus engaged in the Peninsula, he deemed it first necessary, however, to have an interview with the Emperor of Russia in Germany. The spirit of the Germans was again rising; and notwithstanding the spies and troops of Buonaparte, his paid literatilike Johannes Müller,and his paid princeslike those of the Rhenish Confederation, Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg,the Germans were beginning to blush at their humiliation, and to lament the causes of it, their effeminacy, and their division into so many States, with all the consequent prejudices and intestine feuds. Prussia, which had suffered so severely for its selfish policy, and had been so cut down in territory and insulted in its honour by Napoleon, began to cherish the hope of yet redeeming itself, by a more manly spirit and a more cordial co-operation with the rest of Germany. In this work of regenerationwhich is sure to take place sooner or later, when nations have been well beaten and humiliated, and which then, in their renewed manhood, require no foreign aid for the accomplishment of their freedomall classes laboured. The king, under the inspiration of his patriotic Minister, Von Stein, began most essential reforms. He abolished the feudal servitude and forced labour under which the peasantry groaned; he made a thorough moral re-organisation of the army, admitting of promotion from the ranks; he allowed any man that had the money to purchase baronial estates; and he deprived the higher nobility of the exclusive right of possessing landed property, and of appointment to the higher civil and military posts. Von Stein, too, commenced the work of inspiring the mass of the people with a new soul of patriotism. He established a secret society, called the Tugend Bund, or union of Virtue, which was to unite nobles, statesmen, officers, and literati in one common confederation for the rescue of the country. Amongst those who entered the most enthusiastically were Colonel Schill, who had headed with great effect his troop of volunteer cavalry, Jahn, a professor at Berlin, and Moritz Arndt, a professor of Bonn, the author of the famous national song, "Was ist der Deutschen Vaterland?" in which he maintained that it was not Prussia, nor Austria, nor any other particular State, but all Germany, so far as the language extended. Scharnhorst, the commander of the Prussian army, though restricted to the prescribed number of troops, created a new army by continually exchanging trained soldiers for raw recruits, and secretly purchased an immense quantity of arms, so that, on emergency, a large body of men could be speedily assembled. He had also all the brass battery guns converted into field-pieces, and replaced by iron guns. But Napoleon's spies were everywhere. They discovered the existence of the Tugend Bund, and of the secret societies of the students, which they carried on under the old name of the Burschenschaft, or association of the students. Though Napoleon pretended to ridicule these movements, calling it mere ideology, he took every means to suppress them. The Minister, Von Stein, in consequence[566] of the contents of an intercepted letter, was outlawed; Scharnhorst, and Grüner, the head of the police, were dismissed from their offices; but it was all in vainthe tide of public feeling had now set in the right way. The same spirit was alive in Austria. Abuses were reformed; a more perfect discipline was introduced. John Philip von Stadion, the head of the Ministry, encouraged these measures; the views of the Archduke Charles were carried out on a far wider basis. A completely new institution, that of the Landwehr, or armed citizens, was set on foot. The Austrian armies were increased greatly. In 1807 the Hungarian Diet voted twelve thousand recruits; in 1808, eighty thousand; while eighty thousand organised soldiers, of whom thirty thousand were cavalry, constituted the armed reserve of this warlike nation. Napoleon remonstrated, and received very pacific answers, but the movement went on. Von Stein, now a refugee in Austria, fanned the flame there, and he and Count Münster, first Hanoverian Ambassador, and afterwards British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, were in constant correspondence with each other and with the Government of Great Britain.
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