The Press. — London, England, 1856-01-12 00:00:00

40 Poor Joseph could do nothing right. We give some specimens of Napoleoo's brotherly ad monitions : I see that all your military operations are wrong. I cannot understand how, surrounded as you are by men of military eVerience, there are so few who can give you good advice. • ••• My Brother—The kingdom of Naples is very ill ad ministered ; my troops are not paid, and the arrears increase every day. In the spring of 1806, Joseph was called on to resign the uneasy crown of Naples for the yet snore uneasy one of Spain. The seizure of the Spanish monarchy was organised by Napoleon with that rare administrative talent which he displayed in all his great enter prises. The first intimation Joseph received of his destined change was in a letter of April, 1506 : It is not impossible that iu the course of five or six days I may write to desire you to repair to Bayonne. The summons to the Spanish crown came a month later : The nation, through the Supreme Council of Castile, asks me for a king ; 1 destine ibis crown for you. Spain is a very different thing from Naples; it contains eleven millions of inhabitants, and has more than 130,1;00,000 of revenue, without counting the Indies and the immense revenues to be derived from them. It is, besides, a throne which places you at Madrid, at three days' journey from France, which borders the whole of one of its frontiers. At Madrid you are in France; Naples is the end of the Joseph had sense to perceive the magnitude of the enterprise, and, eleven days after he entered Spain, wrote to his brother:— Sire...—lt appears to me that no one has told your Majesty he whole truth. I will not conceal it. Our undertaking a very great one; to get out of it with honour requires vast means. Ido not see double from fear. When I left Naples I saw the risks before me, and I now say to myself every day, "My life is nothing—l give it to you." But if I am to live without the shame of failure, I must be sup• plied largely with men and money. Then the kindness of my nature may make me popular ; now, when all is doubt ful, kindness looks like timidity, and I try to conceal mine. To get quickly through this task, so hateful to a sovereign, to prevent further insurrections, to have less blood to shed and fewer tears to dry, enormous force must be employed. Whatever be the result in Spain, its king must lament, for if he conquers it will be by force ; but, as the die is cast, the struggle should be cut abort. My position does not frighten me, but it is one in which a king never was before. I have not a single partisan. Napoleon replied, " Don't bo uneasy —be happy" _ Troops are pouring in continually from all quarters. Yon have a great many partisans iu Spain—you have all the honest people, but they fear to come forward. He rigorously enforced his system. From Valladolid, Jan. 8, 1809, he writes : I have arrested here twelve of the worst characters and hanged them. He wrote an order to Belliard, commanding at Madrid, that thirty of the worst characters in the town must be arrested and shot : This is what I have done at Valladolid. To Joseph he wrote : I am not satisfied with the order which is kept in Madrid ; Belliard is too weak—with the Spaniards it is necessary to be severe. Again : ICLu must hang at Madrid a score of the worst charac ters. To-morrow I intend to have hanged here seven, no torious for their excesses. They have been secretly denounced to me by respectable people whom their exist ence disturbed, and who will recover their spirits when they are got rid of. If Madrid is not delivered from at least a hundred of these firebrands, you will be able to do nothing. Out of these hundred, hang or shoot twelve or fifteen, and send the rest to France for the galleys. We know to what all this burning and hang ing reduced the great Conqueror at last. It might have been necessary to the maintenance of his " system," as there is great worldly shrewdness in his exhortations to Joseph, and vast knowledge of mankind in all those hints indicating that a conquerer must expect no thing from the attachment of his subjects, and can hope to reign only by fear; but then his system itself was utterly hollow, it could be maintained only by military force, and when that force was weakened it fell in ruin. Joseph at last found the reproofs of his brother intolerable, and Napoleon was still less inclined to listen to Joseph's remon strances. Their direct con espondence ceased for the troubled period that Joseph was nomi nally King of Spain. The reproaches of the Emperor must have been still more galling to the King when delivered by his own generals. Napoleon writes to General Clarke (Aug. 15, 1809 i THE PRESS. The King says that for the last month he has been mancenvring with 40,000 men against 100,000. Tell him that it is his own fault ; and that it is the very thing of which I complain. The bringing Marshal Soult is wrong; it is against all rules ; it is open to every objection, and has no advantage. The next reproof was well deserved. With ex treme folly, Joseph announced the battle of Talavera as a victory gained by the French. The hawk's eye of Napoleon discerned the truth. The letter of August 21, 1809, in which he analysed the account sent to him, is a mas terpiece of keen perception and quick reason ing. To Clarke ho wrote -- In your letter to the King, hint that I disapprove his order of the day; that it tells the soldiers that they are conquerers; that this is ruin to the troops; that I am in want of correct information ; that I wish to know the number of killed and wounded iu each regiment, of guns and standards taken, &c. Say that in Spain affairs are undertaken without reflection or knowledge of war; and . :hat on the day of action there is neither union, nor plan, nor decision. Write to General Sebastiani that the King has sent to me his report; that it is not the report of a soldier describing to me what has been and what is ; that it is full of nothing but fine speeches ; that I had rather that he had told me his real opinions ; and had given an exact and faithful account of what happened. In short, I have a right to be told the truth. A few weeks subsequently General Clarke was commissioned to chide the King more severely : I wish you to write to the King of Spain to impress upon him that nothing can be more contrary to the rules of war than to publish the strength of his army, either in orders of the day, in proclamations, or in the newspapers; that when he has occasion to speak of his strength, he ought to render it formidable by exaggeration, doubling or trebling his numbers; and that, on the other hand, when he mentions the strength of the enemy, he should diminish it by one-half or one-third ; that in war moral force is everything ; that the King deviated from this prin ciple when he said that he had only 40,000 men. and the insurgents 120,000; that to represent the French as few, and the enemy as numerous, discourages us, and gives confidence to them ; that it is publishing his weakness throughout Spain. In short, to give moral force to the enemy is to take it from oneself; for men naturally be lieve that in the long run the small force will be beaten by the greater Constantly in my Italian cam• paigns, when I had only a handful of men, I exaggerated their numbers ; this saved my purpose without diminishing my glory. He adds immediately afterwards : With paltry motives, petty vanities, and small passions, nothing great has ever been done. Strange that the being who could be so saga. cious could also be so shortsighted. In tnose words he has described his own career and his own nature. What a satire upon his constant falsehood —or, to use his own term, "exaggera tion"—upon his lust of conquest and disordered mind, is that reproof of paltry motives, petty vanities, and small passions. His frequent repetition of the phrase, " in war moral force " is everything," induces us to inquire what he meant by " moral force." Not surely the opinion that is intelligent, for that is not to be won by lying; nor the opinion that is free, for that is not to be dominated by the sword ; nor the opinion that is just, for that is not to be conciliated by arbitrary conquest, and by his favorite burning and hanging system : the " moral force" he meant must have been a sort of blind confidence based upon utter ignorance, or upon reports monstrously false. This kind of "moral force," like his system, was not calculated to stand. It broke down at Dist Napoleon's words gained no credit. Whether false or true, they were alike useless, and became ridiculed and despised. Greater mortification to Joseph was soon to follow. Napoleon wrote to Berthier (April 17th, 1810) : The King of Spain is to have no voice as to the confis• cation and disposal of the British goods iu Andalusia. He is only the commander of my army. Even this was not enough. He appointed re ceivers for the six Governments of Spain, who were ordered to pay all their collections to the Imperial Receiver-General, and the south of Spain was handed over to the government of Soult. This last indignity was too much for Joseph His remonstrance on the subject is the best of his letters. In Andalusia alone, he said, he hoped to find some resources : To give the command of the troops to a general who does not recognise my authority is to give him the admi nistration and government of the country. Et is to take from me the only province in which I could hope to live; it is to confine me to Madrid, which gives me only 800,000 francs per mouth, while my indispensable expenses exceed four millions per month. lam here surrounded by the ruins Of a great nation. SATURDAY, It is most instructive to note in this "Cor. respondence" how Napoleon's system was crumbling when it seemed that he was at the height of his power. His empire was to all outward appearance most mighty and glorious in 1810 ; yet even then its foundation, as regarded his boasted conquests, was utterly rotten. By command of Napoleon, Berthier wrote to Joseph : The Emperor, sire, is deeply grieved to hear that the army which is laying siege to Cadiz is in a state of complete destitution ; that their pay is nine months in arrear. This state of things may be productive of serious misfortunes. His Majesty can send to Spain no more than two millions a month, which he has assigned to that employment, because the money of France is exhausted—because, in the present state of affairs in Spain, war must support war— because all the resources in the country must be employed to feed, pay, and clothe the troops which conquer it—because to discipline and pay Spanish troops is to discipline and pay one's enemies—because, lastly, soldiers must be paid before civilians, and, above all, the French troops who alone support your Majesty in Spain. It was vain for Joseph to show that war could not support war ; that he was destitute of resources ; that his Government was con tinually sinking lower and lower: his remon strances were unheeded, and the elements of mill were suffered to gather thickly round the throne which Napoleon had exercised so much treachery to seize, and spent so much blood to maintain. I n this " Correspondence" we see how it is that conquered countries can never be made to pay, and that empires unduly extended by fraud or violence, and upheld only by armed force, bear in them. selves seeds of decay, which at any moment may acquire irresistible force. The tale of Spain is also that of Naples. The conquered countries could not be made to support the conquering armies, and became an intolerable burden on French finances. It is inexplicable why Napoleon, during the three years that he paid such constant atten tion to the affairs of Spain, did not advance himself to encounter Wellington. He rcecived the accounts of the English successes with rage and mortification, yet while they grew he remained inactive in Paris. His invasion of Russia was an enormous error, while Spain was so insecure. Perhaps, had he gone thither in person, his whole fortunes might have been changed. His own campaign beyond the Pyrenees had been triumphantly successful. The editor writes ; When he (Napoleon) entered Spain (in Nov., 1808), the French armies had either capitulated to the English at Cintra, or to the Spaniards at Baylen, or had retired beyond the Ebro. When he left it, less than three months after wards, the English had been driven out of Spain, the resistance of the Spaniards was confined to the defence of a few towns and a guerilla war in the southern and western provinces, and Joseph was again in Madrid. Well is he characterised here, as " the most " provident, the most accurate, and the most " powinl of administrators, and the best " obeyed of generals." Yet not all his autho rity and capacity could prevent enormous abuses from creeping into every military de partment. Some curious examples are given here. But we must break off. There is so much valuable matter in these volumes that we purpose returning to them, more especially as there are points which may be advan tageously brought out in connection with the controversies on military matters prevailing at the present time. Principles of Gover►►►nent; or, Meditations in Exile. By William Smith O'Brien. Dublin : Duffy. THE political career of the author of this work might suggest that his literary compositions would partake of extravagance and political sectarianism. The closing years of Mr. O'Brien's public life were in marked contrast with the moderation of his early course. Utterly unsuited for the part of a tribune, he plunged into the vortex of agitation, when his high position and Protestant connections gave his actions an importance which his want of ora torical faculty would have otherwise prevented hint from gaining Brother to the present Lord Inchiquin, Mr. O'Brien belonged to a family of pure Milesian descent, of high Tory politics, and of considerable landed influence. Much of his personal notoriety resulted, therefore, from the fact of "an aristocrat" condescend ing to work in concert with O'Connell, after he had for years pursued a perfectly independent