We have now described the sedentary life at the chateau. In the next paper the reader shall be carried to the gymnasium; the drill ground behind the lake; to our small menageries of kids, guinea pigs, and rabbits; be present at our annual ball and skating bouts in winter, and at our bathings, fishings, frog-spearings, and rambles over the Jura in summer.
THE CROWNING OF THE COLUMN, AND CRUSHING OF THE PEDESTAL.
It was said in the debate on the Navigation Laws, in the best speech made on the Liberal side, by one of the ablest of the Liberal party, that the repeal of the Navigation Laws was the _crowning of the column of free trade_. There is no doubt it was so; but it was something more. It was not only the carrying out of a principle, but the overthrow of a system; it was not merely the crowning of the column, but the _crushing of the pedestal_.
And what was the system which was thus completely overthrown, for the time at least, by this great triumph of Liberal doctrines? It was the system under which England had become free, and great, and powerful; under which, in her alone of all modern states, liberty had been found to coexist with law, and progress with order; under which wealth had increased without producing divisions, and power grown up without inducing corruption; the system which had withstood the shocks of two centuries, and created an empire unsurpassed since the beginning of the world in extent and magnificence. It was a system which had been followed out with persevering energy by the greatest men, and the most commanding intellects, which modern Europe had ever produced; which was begun by the republican patriotism of Cromwell, and consummated by the conservative wisdom of Pitt; which had been embraced alike by Somers and Bolingbroke, by Walpole and Chatham, by Fox and Castlereagh; which, during two centuries, had produced an unbroken growth of national strength, a ceaseless extension of national power, and at length reared up a dominion which embraced the earth in its grasp, and exceeded anything ever achieved by the legions of Cæsar, or the phalanx of Alexander. No vicissitudes of time, no shock of adverse fortune, had been able permanently to arrest its progress. It had risen superior alike to the ambition of Louis XIV. and the genius of Napoleon; the rude severance of the North American colonies had thrown only a passing shade over its fortunes; the power of Hindostan had been subdued by its force, the sceptre of the ocean won by its prowess. It had planted its colonies in every quarter of the globe, and at once peopled with its descendants a new hemisphere, and, for the first time since the creation, rolled back to the old the tide of civilisation. Perish when it may, the _old English system_ has achieved mighty things; it has indelibly affixed its impress on the tablets of history. The children of its creation, the Anglo-Saxon race, will fill alike the solitudes of the Far West, and the isles of the East; they will be found equally on the shores of the Missouri, and on the savannahs of Australia; and the period can already be anticipated, even by the least imaginative, when their descendants will people half the globe.