The National Register. — London, England, 1811-01-13 00:00:00

" Young suitors shall therefore be selected at the age of from 13 to 16; if younger, the State would wait too long before it enjoyed their services.; if old. r, the physical constitution of man could only be bent with difficulty to all the to k of sea manship. Here it is our duty to communicate one of those fine thoughts of the Emperor—that of imitating, fi out tke present moment, those young conscripts in the career which they are destined to run. " His Majesty has formed crews for ships, and crews for flo tillas. The former, composed of experienced mariners, will man She ships ; for the latter, his Majesty is fitting out in his ports small vessels, commanded by skilful officers ; on board which will be exercised in . manceuvres,_in steering, in the use of arms, those young seamen, whom the Senatus Cnnsultuin, which we present, summons to the honour of serving their country. " .Doubtless, Gentlemen, the experience which they will ac quire in the navigation of the coasts and in the roads, will not he so great as that communicated by distant expeditions; but they will thus be familiarized with their state, they will see and will vanquish its difficulties : they will acquire a taste for it, even in this way, that it will present to them obstacles which they have to surmount; and in a few years they will be fit to serve in a more useful manner, on hoard the ships of his Majesty. " At the same time that his Majesty projected means for training to himself seamen, he has ordered the necessary mea sures for forming the officers who are to command them. Every thing is connected in his .conceptions ; their whole always hears the impression of the genius who presides over the pros perity of tke Empire. PROJECT OF TII E SENATUS CONSULTUM. " Art. I. The coast districts of the thirty departments here after-named shall cease to contribute to the conscription of the sea service. 44 11. The following are thirty departments in which the ma ritime districts shall be reserved : " Maritime Alps, Appenives, Ande, Mouths of the Rhone, Calvados, Lower Charente, Coasts of the North, Dyle, the Scheldt, Finisterre, Gard, Genoa, Gironde, Hera ult, lle and Vi laine, Landes, Lower Loire, Lys, Manche, Montenotte, Mor linan, Two Nether:, Nord, Par de Calais, Lower Pyrtnnees, Eastern Pyrennees, Lower Seine, Somme, Var, Vendee. 111. Ten thousand Conscripts of each of the clas4es of Igl 53, 1814,1815, and 1816, shall be immediately placed at the dis posal of the Minister of Marine. " IV. The present Senatus Consultum shall be transmitted in a message to his Majesty the Emperor and King. TIM NATIONAL REGISTER. SITTING or TIIN 12rn DECEMBrR. - - - - - PARIS, Dec. 18.—The Count de Semonville, in the name of a Select Committee, presented the following detail on the pro kct of the Senatus Consultum, containing the annexation of holland, the Hanse Towns, and the Simplon. U SENATORS—The Committee to whom you referred the project of a Senatus Consultum, relative to the annexation of Holland and the Hanse Towns to the French territory, have charged me to lay before you the motives which call for the edoption of measures of so great an interest. During the course of the labours of the Committee, one leading idea principally impressed our minds : we heve not ceased to feel astonished, that events commanded by so many different circumstances had teen so long deferred. " In reality, Senators, from the period when our victorious armies snatched Holland from the three.-fold oppression of the coalesced Powers, she lost :hat existence which Frederic had designated with so much energy and truth ; she ceased to be a bark, by turns in tow of the two great ships of war—France and England; her crew, to continue the comparison., weee turned enter' to our ship; idrahant formed a part of our terriwry, and Tolland was irrecoverably conquered. There has not passed since, a single day when her union with the French Empire would. not hive been a benefit ; and we say it with confidence, tin invaluable benef,t, lime she would have been spared a long series of privations, of losses, and of misfortunes. Bat such is the empire of habits and of self-love over nations as well as indi- KIWIS ; the changes which strike. their eye in all that 3 lrrouuds tlierd, in vain remind them of their own decline; they bot h Opel the secret conviction which pursues them. A blind senti ment averts their eyes from the lessons of experience, and they make their close More fatal by their efforts to ward it off. " Our colours were Boating over the whole Bavarian terri tory; the partisans of England fled in the ships which they besely sold to the enemy. Its incorporation with France, the association .of the Batavians with their brothers in Belgium, ouelit to have been the first of their wishes, the most pressing of their wants. The public debt, which bad not then received that immense increase to which it latterly arrived, might have been entirely - saved from shipwreck ; vast communications of com merce mighehave been opened with France; enormous charges would not, for i; years, have weighed down these intereetieg =1=:.1•7, 1 1#. , z , *77* 19 countries : antl for what? to nbtain the batcren harmer ofd Go vernment pretendedly natioxal, :Is if a nation could exist whei e there was neither uidependence, nor army, nor territory suscep tible of defence. " Those times are passed, when the conceptions of sumo . Statesmen gave authority, in the public opinion, to the system of balances, of guarantees, of counterpoise. of political equili brium. Pompous illusions of Cabinets of the second order ! visions of imbecility ! which all disappear before necessity, that power which regulates the duration and the mutual relations of, empires. Would not the successive Governments of Holland, in a thousand instances, have been subservient to interne] agitae dons, to the efforts of England, had not the force of the French empire been constantly acting upon them to maintain and. to defend them ! " And when England affronted France by supposing that this force was absent, because the Emperor was meditating victory on the banks of the Danube, was it Holland that could have repelled the fleet, and the British legions assembled to ream .. . mence the oppression and disgrace of the Helder ? Certainly not: truths so manifest require neither proof nor example. Holland, like the Hance Towns; would remain the prey of uncertainty, of dangers, of revolutions, of oppressions of every kind, if the genius who decides the destinies of Europe, did n t cover her with his invincible zgis. The Emperor has resolved in his wisdom to incorporate them with the immense family of which he is the head. " In adopting this grand resolution, perhaps he himself obeys, more than he is aware of, the law of necessity. If he cor.unaqd4 the glory of times present, the events which preceded his com ing command those of his reign—that uninterruped succession of causes and effects which form the history of nations and the destiny of their chiefs. That of the Napoleons was to reign end to conquer ; victory belongs to him, war to his age. Among the wars recorded h 1 our history, there is not one dining which the jealous rivalry of England has not b en the direct cause of our troubles, our misfertunes, our dangers—of our energy, our combats, our-conquests. " In the feudal times, England divided our nieces, kept oer vassals in pay, ravaged our fields ; she foresaw that the throne Of their Sovereigns would one day be the fu st in thennivereese s driven back to her islands,' she every where sought for avengers ' of her quarrel; Germany, Italy, the Spains, number but fed; cities, where combats have not been mainteincel during three hundred years for the- cause of England. To heft her, of r Kings made pretensions to universal Monarchy after the siege of Rochelle, the works of Toulon, and the surren der of Courtray. The most pusillanimous . reigns - could not I impose silence on her accusations, nor luil asleep her hares!. In her eyes the French people were always the san ; they only wanted circumstances and a chief, to resume the name of G. eat. A total subversion was necessary to the project of England ; she 1 1 wished far a bloody revolution ; because her own had been I cruel, and because, amidst our discords, it strum at, with the same sword, both our industry and our institutions : both the conquerors and the conquered; both the people and the dynasty. All Europe was summoned to this work of destruction : every where repulsed—every where threatened —trembling for heiself —she stopped short in presence of the conflagratien i t e,.lsted . up by the firebrands of the British Cabinet. At lasnaftee ten years of a struggle glorious for France, the most extraerednary eenius ever formed by nature in her magniticflicc, ccl;cctF in his tri ' .umphatit hands the scattered fragments cat the sceptre of Char. lelnagne. " The injuries of France are avenged ; frenth rs, c mpacted by moderation and traced out by nature, are ties trophies raised to the happiness of her people, to the trenciaillity of Europe. The Emperor proposes peace. Vain hope of a greet soul! Thrice the c• - y of alarm was raised on all iities—thrice one victory led only to others; and peace, elweysollered, always de manded, and as it were pursued, retired before our cegles to the extremities of Europe. " In those shocks of which human prudence cannot moderate the effects, Empires of the first rank are overthrown from their foundations; small States disappear; we have seen the Gothic supports of the European editise tumble down cl themselves, without the possibility of their being rebuilt on the same p tan ; and heel no the genius pi order advanced with a step equal to that of ariniva, it would no loereer have been war, hut anarchy and which the 18th century had bequeathed to its succcesors. I Dees the conqueror percei ve f ro m the height of his car, nations united by ancient habits ; he seeks out taitbful princes, he creates for them common interes t s . he entrests to them .fhe I destinies of regenerated h:tetes, of which he has declared himself the Pr,,tector. " But where all forms of goverrment have been tried in vair ; where the aggregations are too small, or destitute of suffid sit principles of adhesion to form masses; where localities would infallibly ribject men and things to the t!irect action of avarice, of the attults or intrigues of t.te eternal enemies of France;