The Express.
London, England, 1852-11-19 00:00:00

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LONDON. FRIDAY, NO1•BMBER 19.

Our WELLINGTON lain his grave. Some of us re-
member the dread of hearing that news in our youth.
Some who were infants at the beginning of our cen-
tury remember, as a dark cloud resting on their
holm bold day, the death of Net.sos. They remem-
ber hearing what Nit.. PITT said—that be had often,
while Minister. peen called lap in the night toreceave
news good or bad, aad that he had always before
been able to lay down his head, and sleep imme-
diately ; but that when Lord Co Ll.lNGWlam's despatch
with its tidings from Trafalgar came in the night,
he was so restless that he rose at three
o'clock. From 1:409 to 1813, there wits a dread that
news of the like kind might come about WELLING-
TON. The death and burial of Sir JOIIN MooitE had
touched all hearts; and whenever tidings arrived of
a new sweep of the French armies over the provinces
of the Peninsula, men held their breath in the fear
that the next news might be of WELLINGTON lying
under the sod—'• left alone with his glory." a
would all the millions of our people have been to
know that the hero would stand before Parliament
to receive their thanks—would enter the House

of Lords under the singular circumstances of
In. accumulated honours,—having risen through the
whole gnulution of ranks before he took his seat at
all. (aid would theme multitudes have been to know
how their hero would outlive most of them, and
would at lost lie, not under the sod, but under the
high-raised cross of our.greatest cathedral ; not left
alone with his glory, but with NI:LSON by his
side, and the certainty of being visited by successive
generations, till that lofty roof shall mumble down,'
to be the outermost coffin of England's two greatest
heroes.
_ _ _

Glad, again, would the thoughtful among those
multitudes have been to know that WELLINGTON
would live till his precise position in modern history
should be determined by the lapse of a long period
of peace. We are not among those flatterers of the
great man who rate his political services as high as
his military achievements. We would rather point
to the truly civic tendencies of his military services,
and to the singularity of his position as bridging
over the passage from the military to the civic age
in Europe and its history. WELLINGTON'S wars
were for the preservation of national exi-tence;—
of our own, and a good many more. The days were
over when Sovereigns went to war for personal
offences, for bite of debateable land, or for want of
excitement, or of something to do. It was that
England might remain England, with her govern-
ment and laws, and language, and her liberties, that
WELLINGTON paid the glorious ransom of his seven
rani' warfare and his fifteen victories. Those ric •
tones were so splendid that the barbaric pomp of the
old military ages could not but stretch itself out to
enfold them; and thus, in one sense, the fame of our
hero is connected with those military periods of the
world which are passing away, to be regarded, at
some future time, like the encampment of the Greeks
before Troy, or the progress of ALEXANDER in India,
or the march of CAMETSES from Memphis to Thebes.
This being one aspect of WELLINGTON'S achieve-
ments, what is another? He was attending his
duty in the one House of Parliament when that
warning was given in the other which will never be
forgotten while Europe has a hist ,ry—CANNING'S
warning and prophecy of the inevitableness of a
War of Opinion in Europe. This warning was
uttered on the 12th of December, 1826; and deep it
must have lain in WELLINGTON'S mind, as in many
others, from that time forward. War was not over;
but war would in future be for new objects, and
animated by new principles. WELLINGTON'S wars
secured civic fruits, and future wars must be for purely
civic purposes. We see now, year by year, that it
is even so. We see that the War of Orinion in
Europe began in 1818, and that it must break out
again and again, or be protracted till the great con-
flict of opinion is settled. The warfare on which
Europe is entering received a sort of civic prepara-
tion ages ago; when, for instance, our Barons assem-
bled at Runnymede; and when a middle class was
growing up at the mouths of rivers, and within the
walls of towns, under cover of the feudal wars of
sovereigns and nobles. When our own House of
Lords met, after the close of the wars of tho Roses,
and found their numbers reduced by two-thirds,
while the burgher classes had increased and mul-
tiplied, that clearing of the field for a far-
distant war of opinion had begun which
WELLINGrow was to complete. He swept away the
last military power which interfered with the opera-
tion of civic principles; and he has delivered over to
lee, clew of barbaric intruders, and swept of every
ambush the field on which the war of opinion is to
be fought. That done, he has retired into his grave ;
and we must look for leaders as appropriate to the
coming time ash. was to his.
Nations and their rulers know very well that it is
the first principles of social liberty that have now
to bo contended for on the continent of Europe.
It may probably be the pooh* War that the world
has ever seen. If the esgessiens of tyrants
should bring it on very mom to mot living is likely
to see the end of it. The sing* will be, in fact,
between the Asiatic and &repot Milos reliving in
society—a much larger question duo woe nationali-
ties and territorial tionsiniet. The s 1e will be
between despotism and regneemiledee-Getitritium
ism lives in that peat d imp which I.
lotruing by an Asiatic atemegitoot while, in the
most advanced countries it *ma d &rope, the
representative system d hoo sever her
mere than a
Were Tewasetell hob* how-
ever, as the Western boa Awe illo_sepeassil.
begia4eugemagg
it is strong enough to get Illestort °Orden to
some hard shifts ; and latterly, to that hardest of all,
unbearable tyranny. WILLLIXOTON lived to Ns ter-
ritorial alliances giving way before politico* *Safi.
ties—the old before the new—the mechanical heifer
the essential union; and many of us may live lasso
the thickest of the fight, when Pope and Hahn%
Emperors by ancient prerogative, and Suspense by
vulgar usurpation, may be struggling for a supre-
macy rendered vain by the actual disintegration of
nations. It may be for • puratioa yet unborn to
see the issue of the warfare. What that issue will
be, no man will presume to say. We can only say
what it will not be. It will not be, ea in
many wars of the olden time, a mere re-
currence to the previous state of things;—
a burying of the dead out of eight, and
going on as before. It will not be a set
of grants and concessions of territory, agreed
upon by potentates, without reference to their peoples.
WELLIXOTON saw the last of such doings. When
the conflict is about the establishment of the prin-
ciples of western civilisation—with the representative
principle for the leading feature—the terms of peace
must be something very different from that. We
will not prophesy that which shall be. It is enough
to say that we have done with the past, and that we
know it by the toten, that the military achievements
of our greatest soldier were, in fact, civic services, and
that thus, while one pier of the great arch of his fame
is hung all over with the banners of armies and the
trophies of the field, the other is planted on that
table land where, if men go to war, it is because
pence beckons them on ; and if men strive to lay one
another low, it is that manhood itself may arise to
live in a higher freedom. The Sovereigns of Europe
sent mourners to Wep.lNOTotell boreal. They, as
they bent over his pave yesterday, probably thought
of him as a wittier in the olden sense. We trust
there were native Englishmen among that vast assem-
blage who thought of him more as the preserver of
our nationality; and, in that, as the champion—
unconsciously perhaps, but most truly—of the popular
liberties of Europe.

A trrAremattrr appeared setae weeks again several
journals of diverse treatiment and tendency that the
gallant SECRETARY-AT-WAR wee about to heat a
precipitate retreat to Jamaica. We gave at the time
but little credit to the rumour. Under the very
peculiar etreametaame ill which the right hon.